
































































































































































Book_ -0c <b. 

GojpgM?— 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 





































































































































THE SANDS OF ORO 


BOOKS BY 

BEATRICE GRIMSHAW 


Conn of the Coral Seas 
Guinea Gold 
My Lady of the Island 
My South Sea Sweetheart 
Nobody’s Island 
The Sands of Oro 
The Sorcerer’s Stone 
The Terrible Island 
When the Red Gods Call 
















COPYRIGHT, 1924 , BY 

V" 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

ALL BIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 


COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY CONSOLIDATED MAGAZINES CORPORATION (THE 
BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE.) ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 
AT 

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 


First Edition 

JAN 16 *24 


ClM 66773 . 

'He 'V' 


V 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE: 

I. A Wedding in Far-Away. 1 

II. Birds of Paradise. 16 

III. Maud Muller.33 

IV. The Plan of Tom Blazes. 49 

V. Shells and Pearls.61 

VI. The Hand in the Night.76 

VII. Blood on the Sands.102 

VIII. Jammed. 110 

IX. The Deep Sea and the Devil .... 116 

X. Alone on Oro.140 

XI. The Terror of the Reef.159 

XII. Held Fast. 173 

XIII. “Once Aboard the LuGGER ,, .179 

XIV. Thursday Island.196 

XV. The Derelict. 216 

XVI. The Killing of the Devil. 225 

XVII. The Secret of Oro.- . 247 

XVIII. Heart of Gold. 278 

































THE SANDS OF ORO 















































- 1 


r 


5 


! 

* 




THE SANDS OF ORO 


CHAPTER I 

A WEDDING IN FAR-AWAY 

N EAP tide is evil tide, in that sinister, strange 
land called Papua. 

Wander about Port Moresby of a neap tide 
night, down Ela beach—among the mangrove swamps 
near the houses or under Goldie Law, where the foul 
mud palpitates to the heave of poisonous life—and, if 
you go alone, listen, with the tumpery tin town and its 
jangling people shut quite away from your mind, and 
you will hear, in the wicked stillness of the tides, the 
heart of Papua speaking. 

She does not change. In nineteen hundred and ten, 
with a few score miners, Government folk, traders, and 
missionaries for all her population, with never a town 
that could justly be called a town, with not a carriage 
road in the Territory, she was what to-day, with towns 
and plantations, and roads of a sort, and traffic of a 
kind, she still is: a sinister wilderness informed with 
the spirit of evil. 

Papua will get you—if she can. That is what she 
tells you, with insolent plainness, the first hour that 
you spend away from the steamer, when you look 
across from Port Moresby’s shores and hotels to the 

1 


2 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


untamed black hills beyond the blue harbour. No one 
has ever put into words just what it is that those hills 
say to the newcomer, of a scarlet evening at sundown, 
when the Day of Judgment seems impending over the 
doomed town, and the lands where no man goes are 
darkening into a night that is like the last night of all. 

But it is not only the sensitive, the people of moods 
and words, who hear this inimical snarl. Every one 
hears it. The road-gang overseer, the woman coming 
up to cook for the hotel, and the clerk in whose ears, 
heretofore, has sounded —“Even in dreams the chink of 
his pence ”—stares round, and says, with a shiver not 
quite disagreeable: “My word, it is a queer place all 
right; looks like getting up and biting you, if you 
understand what I mean.” . . . 


When the Morinda , carrier of half the hopes and 
fears of Papua, made herself fast to the wharf at Port 
Moresby, it was hot February, it was neap tide, and it 
was sunset. Stacy Rowan, the newest bride, looked 
out from the rails at the straggling town; mangroves 
edging, like mourning borders, the gray mud of Kone- 
dobu; far off, the wicked sunset was dying behind the 
wicked hills. Natives, who in their slim brown naked¬ 
ness looked overbalanced by their tremendous New 
Guinea wigs of black wool, loafed about the wharf, spit¬ 
ting red betel nut, and staring at the strangers. 

As many a bride had asked before, Stacy, the latest 
and newest, asked herself with dismay: “However am 
I to live here?” Then she gathered up her forces, and 
put on a smile, seeing the man she was to marry next 
morning step across the gangway. 

“He might have been a little quicker,” was her 


A WEDDING IN FAR-AWAY 


3 


thought, instantly suppressed. Now was not the time 
for criticism. Nor ever any more, if she was to be 
wise and happy. And she meant to be both. 

Holliday had his newest white suit on and a freshly 
pipe-clayed helmet. His face was pale under the elec¬ 
tric lights of the Morinda that had shone on so many 
meeting and parting couples through the years. The 
sarcastic interest of friends standing and staring on 
the wharf, the looks directed at Stacy, stung him like 
mosquito bites. True, he had always accepted mar¬ 
riages—other men’s marriages—as essentially farcical 
incidents; he had cheapened the looks of many a bold 
or shy young woman, meeting her betrothed on that 
pier. But when it was yourself—your marriage 
. . . Thank God, Stacy had turned herself out 

well; he liked that white flibberty, lacy gown, and the 
big simple hat. What a little gentlewoman she looked 
among all these commonplace or brazen women. It 
wasn’t often they saw a bride of her class step down 
the gangway. 

He threw out his chest, and went to meet her with a 
comfortable feeling of pride. After all, no one could 
say that he wasn’t in luck. 

Stacy stood to meet him at the door of her cabin, a 
light figure that somehow looked smaller than it really 
was; a slim thing with something rare about her; eyes 
dark and sweet yet almost boyish in their direct gay 
glance; pink lips in a pointed cream-pale face. 

Pretty? Attractive rather; elusive, a little—the in¬ 
tellectual, not the fleshy type. Stacy, you could see, 
was not just every one’s fancy. You would pique 
yourself on knowing how to appreciate her. You 
would wonder—if you had not had cause to wonder a 
hundred times before—how it is that some men fancy 


4 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


some women; odder still, how some women fancy some 
men. . . . 

The solution, here, would have been simpler than you 
thought. Stacy did not fancy this man—especially. 

Yes, you would have had a chance—perhaps. For 
at this moment, standing, in the last of her maiden 
days, on the Morinda’s deck, with her bridegroom just 
ready to greet her, Stacy is, for the final time in her 
life, quite fancy-free. 

You see, the girl had a conscience; she would not 
have promised to promise all sorts of things to God 
and Charlie Holliday if there had been any one else— 
any one else in the whole world. It might have been 
you—had you been on the Morinda’s deck, and had 
Stacy—rare little Stacy—seen you in just the right 
light. You may, for what I know, be most attractive. 
And there would have been no sin in Stacy’s changing 
her mind—that night. 

But you were not there, you know, and Charlie Hol¬ 
liday was and Stacy had promised to marry him be¬ 
cause—most unlike a real heroine—she had not had 
any other proposals, and was anxious to settle down 
in a home of her own. The trouble with Stacy was 
that she belonged to the wrong generation. She was 
still quite young, but in spirit she was of the ’eighties 
and ’nineties; a rather highly educated girl, with the 
student paleness and the student nervousness just a 
little developed; a dainty taste in clothes, but no lik¬ 
ing for public semi-nakedness; not mad on motoring; 
without the Boccaccio freedom of speech that many a 
decent, innocent girl affects. Yet feminine. Yet rare. 
Yet with a heart—the rarest thing of all. 

And the young men of Sydney had not proposed to 
her. Worse, she had not wanted them to do so. 


A WEDDING IN FAR-AWAY 


5 


There was a story of fallen fortunes—everybody’s 
story—of “coming out to the Colonies” to retrieve 
them; of a father who died without retrieving anything. 
Stacy, named Anastatia, after some impossible great- 
aunt, did not fit into her cheap suburban surroundings. 
The better class of Australia was not for her. Holli¬ 
day was from “home.” He had stayed at the same 
boarding house when on his leave—the widow and her 
daughter could just afford a boarding house existence, 
faintly liked by one, detested by the other. And so it 
had come about. 

From sixteen until twenty-six Stacy had waited, 
shyly, secretly, for the Prince. At twenty-six, among 
Mrs. Walker’s distressful “paying-guests” she had de¬ 
cided, in her clear, college-trained mind, that he was 
not coming, and that she had better, with her eyes 
open and her heart tight closed, set forth along the 
common way of womanhood. 

Therefore, the Morinda and the staring electric 
lights; therefore, Charlie Holliday drawing her back 
into her cabin, to kiss her unobserved; therefore, the 
dead, strange feeling as his lips met hers—the cer¬ 
tainty that she might like, but would never love, the 
man whose wife, this time to-morrow evening, she would 
be. 

What Charlie Holliday thought was much more com¬ 
monplace; it turned upon his luck, upon the “saucy 
pieces” some men had got for wives; upon the certainty 
that this sweet maiden would never bring scandal to 
his name. Upon the nuisance of the ceremony to-mor¬ 
row ; upon the comfortable home he was going to have. 

. . . Stacy’s point of view did not occur to him 

at all. 

They went ashore together. Holliday had arranged 


6 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


that Stacy should spend the night at the house of a 
married friend. Next day, after the wedding, a boat 
would take them down the coast to Siai, the Govern¬ 
ment station, of which Holliday was the Resident Mag¬ 
istrate. 

The wonderful green dusk of a Port Moresby “north¬ 
west” evening was settling fast into night. Out on the 
reef two tiny beacon towers showed red-lit heads 
against a faded sunset. In the embrace of the great 
sweep of harbour hills the town was a toy, a little noth¬ 
ing, overshadowed by the blackening peaks behind 
Tatana. To Stacy, sensitive, highly strung, some¬ 
what inclined toward nerves and depression, as a girl 
may not unnaturally be on the last day of her girlish 
life, the sinister aspect of the place struck home. Yet 
she knew that it had its own loveliness if she had but 
been in the mood to see it. Of a sudden, as she stepped 
down the slanting gangway, supported by Charlie’s 
hand, a wind from nowhere broke over her soul, and 
she felt what this evening, this place, might have been, 
if only the dream that she had put from her had found 
its realization. The dream and the glory! The one man 
whom she had never met, never now would meet! What 
they would have meant to her in this wild, strange 
land! . . . “The desert were a paradise . 

if thou wert there—if thou wert there!” 

“Mind that last step,” said Charlie’s somewhat 
squeaky voice. “You shouldn’t wear such high heels; 
they’re not safe.” His well-bred, undistinguished 
face, with the sandy hair showing under the helmet, 
and the scrubby moustache bristling over a lower lip 
that went too far back, looked up, lighted by a bunch 
of cargo electrics, as she stepped down. The winches 
had sprung to work slinging cases and bales out of the 


A WEDDING IN FAR-AWAY 


7 


holds; the noise they made was deafening, bewildering. 
Stacy could hardly “hear herself think.” A 
face that showed suddenly, for a moment, in the blaze 
of light, behind the head of Charlie Holliday, seemed 
so unreal to her that she did not fully understand she 
had seen it until she and Holliday were away from the 
ship and walking down the encumbered, noisy wharf. 

Then she remembered the face clearly. She thought 
it was new to her, and yet, somehow, familiar—an odd 
contradiction in terms for logical Stacy. 

It was shadowed by a white sun-helmet, like most of 
the others on the pier, sunset being, as yet, not far 
behind, but it seemed to her to have something curiously 
arresting about it. It looked at her—but plenty of 
people did that; Stacy, if she had gone short of actual 
“offers,” had nevertheless enjoyed her share of ordi¬ 
nary “attention.” She could not recall the features 
exactly; only the impression they made, which was one 
of hardness, keenness, and immense, almost discon¬ 
certing self-possession. And the eyes looked out— 
right out. They carried. 

It was like the trick you play, glancing at something 
in a vivid light, and then swiftly looking away again. 
The image stays, like a photograph, for a moment. 

The face stayed with Stacy, momentarily, and was 
gone. She found she had lost step with Charlie’s conver¬ 
sation, and would have to pick up. He had been talking 
steadily almost from the instant of their meeting. He 
was talking steadily still—telling her about some in¬ 
tolerable act of iniquity and oppression which had to 
do with him, Charles Holliday, with the Hon: The 
Government Secretary, and with certain minutes and 
reports callously annotated “Please Explain.” The 
Hon: The Government Secretary, it seemed, had 


8 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


sinned against all canons of humanity. It appeared 
to be a case where the Geneva Convention should have 
been called in—in justice to wounded Holliday. 

He burbled on. Stacy walked beside him through 
the violent lights and shadows of the wharf, past the 
town, and to the quiet house where she was to spend the 
night. She hardly opened her lips. She had not re¬ 
membered him so selfish. Did he not even want to know 
what sort of a voyage she had had ? 

It seemed he did, at last. When the introduction to 
the elderly ex-missionary host and hostess was over, 
and he was moving away to pass down the veranda 
stairs again, he suddenly turned about. 

“Had a good trip and all that?” he asked, care¬ 
lessly. 

Stacy had not had a good trip. It had been rough; 
she had been sick most of the way; the passengers had 
been an unpleasant crowd, and one of the men had an¬ 
noyed her by trying, persistently, to get up the sort of 
cheap flirtation that the engaged girl knows so well. 

She remembered all this, but she deliberately replied, 
pardoning herself for the lie: 

“Quite all right, thanks.” 

“ ’S’right,” said Charlie, twisting his moustache. He 
looked about him. The missionary pair, who had be¬ 
friended countless brides and bridegrooms in their 
time, were discreetly invisible. “ ’S’right,” said Char¬ 
lie again, in a satisfied tone. He kissed her heartily. 
“Night-night,” he said, and went. 

Stacy stayed for a moment on the veranda and then 
went in to join her hosts. 

Since she had dined they showed her to her room, 
leaving her, with the finest of tact, entirely to herself. 
The night was cooling down, the after-sunset breeze 


A WEDDING IN FAR-AWAY 


9 


had begun to blow. White curtains in the room were 
flapping pleasantly. There was a small white bed; a 
little simple furniture. Stacy’s suit-case and dress¬ 
ing bag, carried ahead by boys, had already come. 
The place looked home-like, pleasant; after the 
cramped quarters of the ship and the crowding and 
staring on the pier it was infinitely restful. 

Stacy took off her hat and smoothed her hair. She 
did not purpose to leave the room again that night. 
There was a comfortable lounge chair; she lay down 
upon it, hands beneath her head, and tried her hardest 
not to think. Now was not the time for thinking— 
that time was past. It was the time for making up 
one’s mind to go through with it. Just a resolution, 
an accepting of things as they were. Perhaps it was 
better not even to make resolutions; you didn’t resolve 
about things that were settled. What were those pic¬ 
tures on the wall ?—one could interest oneself with them 
for awhile. There were a good many. “The Sea 
Hath Its Pearls”—tiresome, inevitable thing! Wasn’t 
there a song? How did it go? 

. . . The sea hath its pearls. 

And my heart hath its love. 

She felt as one feels who picks up an innocent- 
seeming piece of dark iron and finds it almost red-hot. 
Not that song to-night! What was the next picture? 
Equally inevitable—Leighton’s love-intoxicated pair, 
the famous “Wedded.” Oh! not that either! 

She sprang up from the lounge, and began to walk 
about the room, hands behind her, as was her way when 
restless. What other pictures? A gallery of family 
enlargements—three pairs of brides and bridegrooms 
among them. Had some evil spell descended on her? 


10 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Why could she see nothing but love pictures on this 
night of all others? 

It came to her that all pictures—all, that is, of uni¬ 
versal appeal—were love pictures. The room contained 
nothing in the least degree uncommon. Its ornaments 
were the ornaments of a million others. It was she who, 
somehow or other, had fallen out of step with simple, 
common, human thoughts and ways—and she, setting 
forth to-morrow on the common road, from which 
there could be no drawing-back. 

Any more? Marcus Stone’s “The Lovers’ Quarrel.” 
Inevitable, too. Then Watts’s “Love and Life” and 
“Love and Death.” She knew these also; the first said 
little to her, but before the second she stood for a 
moment, hands behind her, grave eyes staring. What 
would it be to love like that? She could fancy herself 
—no, could have fancied herself; that was the term to 
use now—standing in the place of the weak small Love, 
holding back, with bleeding hands—with shattered 
arms, maybe, like Scottish Margaret—that imminent 
white form of Death. 

Next picture—the last. No painting of love or 
separation this; a simple, enlarged photographic 
group of men. White suits, bare heads; the roof of a 
veranda over. Men sitting round a table, intent upon 
some business—turning away from it just for a mo¬ 
ment, to face the camera. That was the impression. 
There was a line printed in ornamental characters 
underneath—“The Papuan Trading and Mining and 
Plantation Association. First meeting, 19-.” 

Out of them all one face seemed to leap; to look at 
her, and hold her eyes. Stacy could not, afterward, 
remember any of the others clearly. 

It was a man at the near end of the table, dressed, 



A WEDDING IN FAR-AWAY 


11 


like the others, in white. He had turned in his chair, 
and was leaning on the back of it with one arm. His 
eyes, large, light, intensely masculine, looked straight 
into hers. There was something candid about the face, 
yet reserve sat there; the candour told you nothing 
but what it chose. Black eyebrows barred the fore¬ 
head heavily, with an effect almost odd; a dark mous¬ 
tache, thick grown and long, in the fashion of the day, 
gave a certain touch of fierceness. Hard, concen¬ 
trated, determined, the face was that of the typical 
pioneer. It was not till you had noted all these things 
that you saw it was a handsome face; immediately on 
this came the conviction that the owner of it knew, and 
that he did not care. A certain touch of awkward¬ 
ness about the figures and attitudes of the other men, 
rather than anything very noticeable in the leaning 
figure, led you to observe that the man was well-made, 
graceful beyond the average. His age seemed to be 
somewhere about forty; but a forty as different from 
the forty of cities and civilization as middle-age of 
the cattle-dog, that runs all day among flying hoofs 
and threatening horns, is different from the middle- 
age of a snuffling watch-dog in a square. 

Across the mind of Charlie Holliday’s bride flitted an 
unbidden vision of the future. Charlie was thirty-five, 
and looked every day of it. He would be more like the 
house-dog than the cattle-dog—much more so—in ten 
years’ time. She could see him with an expanding- 
figure. The man in the picture had a waist like a bit 
of spring steel. He had a small, slightly boned hand, 
but it looked as if it could hold. . . . Charlie’s 

fingers were inclined to be podgy. 

Determinedly, Stacy wrenched her mind away from 
that train of thought. Charlie was a good fellow, and 


12 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


very fond of her. What would it be like if this man 
was fond of any one? 

Like a flash the answer came. This man would not 
be “fond” of any one, he would love. 

“Oh!” cried Stacy, sitting down and putting her 
hands over her eyes. “Am I a bad woman? How can 
I think like this, the very night before my wedding? A 
man I never—never . . . even . . .” 

She could not finish the sentence. She knew—had 
known from the first moment her eyes fell on the pic¬ 
ture—that the face was the face she had seen, for an 
instant, under the staring electrics upon the wharf an 
hour ago. 

And it had looked at her—she knew that, too—as no 
man ever had looked at her before; as never Charlie 
could look at any woman in the world. 

She turned slowly, magnetized, and fixed her eyes 
once more on the pictured face, so careless, so strong, 
so certain of itself. After a time—she could not tell 
how long—she withdrew her eyes. The candle that she 
had lit on coming in was wasted, and guttering low in 
its holder. The night was waxing late . . . To¬ 

morrow ! To-morrow! 

For all her keen mind, for all the college training on 
which she prided herself, Stacy did not know the mean¬ 
ing of the wild fit of tears that swept over her and left 
her beaten down as corn is beaten down by rain. She 
did not know that it was Nature’s last despairing cry 
—the immemorial cry of the unborn children for the 
father that God meant for them and civilization denied. 

The Government launch, Tatana , under a foaming 
northwest breeze, was rolling on the road to Siai, out¬ 
side Idler’s Bay. In Port Moresby, it being a Satur- 


A WEDDING IN FAR-AWAY 13 

day midday, men were gathered about the great ex¬ 
change of conversation, Flanagan’s bar. 

Somebody—a trader—cursed the “blanky Govern¬ 
ment” for the state of native trade. Somebody—a 
Government official—pretended not to hear, lest he 
should be obliged to take notice; finished his glass of 
beer, and spoke loudly on the ever-green and interest¬ 
ing question of the steamer time-table. Somebody—a 
plantation manager from out back, who had been cele¬ 
brating mail-day—broke into comment about the mag¬ 
istrate’s wedding, and criticized him freely for a stingy 
beggar that grudged his friends a glass of champagne, 
and had “gone and got married in a whisper, away at 
the mission house.” 

“And a pretty girl,” he continued, leaning back 
in his deck chair, and looking mournfully at the tum¬ 
bler he held in his hand, as if Stacy were somewhere 
buried within the depths of it. “Mind you, a pretty 
girl, a nice girl, decent too, none of your (blank) Port 
Moresby weddings where a chap is hauled off by the 
scruff of his neck to make an honest woman of her— 
you know-” 

Some of the men nodded. It appeared they did. 

“A pretty girl, from down south,” went on the 
manager, sentimentally. “A girl with a (blank) com¬ 
plexion, and we don’t even have a look at her!” 

The barmaid, a skinny little old-young woman with 
a face plastered like a wall, and a sly, evil look, lifted 
her hand and yawned behind it, contemptuously. 

“The Mosquito’s jealous,” suggested a miner, lean¬ 
ing across the bar. 

“Not me,” said the barmaid, with a high, affected 
laugh. “I daresay she’s no better than she need be, 
no more than any one else.” 



14 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“That’s right, Mosquito, wire into her. Of course 
she isn’t,” agreed the trader. A neighbour jogged 
him sharply by the elbow. 

“What’s the matter?” he asked, with an oath. 

“Hold your jaw. Look at him!” whispered his 
friend. 

The trader turned round. A tall lean man, with 
regular features and a hard expression, was looking 
fixedly at him. 

“Well, what do you want?” he blustered. 

“Ladies,” said the tall man, very clearly, “have the 
privilege of criticizing each other if they like. When 
a man criticizes a lady, he has to answer for it.” 

“What the blazes is she to you?” 

“Shut it! Shut it!” urged his friend, whispering, 
and dragging him by the arm. “Come away. I want 
you.” 

“Mrs. Holliday,” said the tall man, “isn’t anything 
to me. I simply don’t choose to have a decent woman’s 
name spoken lightly of when I’m about to prevent it.” 
His face turned dangerously white as he spoke. The 
friend of the trader saw, and half laughing, wholly in 
earnest, managed somehow to urge and drag him into 
the billiard-room. 

“You never gave me that hundred up,” he said. 
“Come on.” Shamming reluctance, the man let him¬ 
self be led. 

“What’s it all about?” asked the official of another, 
putting down his empty glass, and preparing to go. 
“Does he know her?” 

“Never met her,” declared the other in a low tone of 
voice, looking across at the tall man, who had come 
back to his normal colour now. “She’s a stranger to 
every one here—some one from Home, I believe. 


A WEDDING IN FAR-AWAY 


15 


Rather a swell, like what Holliday thinks himself. But 
that chap was just getting ready to punch the face off 
Cripps. He’s a terrible hitter when he does get his 
monkey up, and it’s up about something to-day.” 

“Yes?” 

“I should think so. Bear with a sore head he is, and 
he’s had a good few nips since breakfast. Doesn’t 
show on him, of course. I daresay he’s got a nasty 
letter by the mail. Happens to all of us sometimes.” 

“It does,” agreed the official, with a bitten-off sigh. 
“Pity he runs with such a crowd; he’s one of the very 
best.” 

“He doesn’t run with any crowd, he runs with the 
whole Territory—Government House down to Dutch 
Joe. Only fellow in New Guinea who can,” declared 
the other official. “But I wonder what’s started him 
having a couple this morning; he’s mostly on the 
water wagon. It must have been an earthquake of 
some kind or other that put him out; he’s made of rub¬ 
ber and cast iron, I should say.” 

“Yes, so should I. Are you coming to lunch?” 

Outside, the northwester rattled in the palms and 
blew white feathers of foam along the sea-road by the 
wharves. Plates chinked in Flanagan’s dining room; 
the black boys shuffled about from table to table. 

Above, in the deserted bedroom story, the man who 
was made of rubber and cast iron sat alone in his room, 
with his head buried in his hands. 


CHAPTER II 


BIRDS OF PARADISE 

I N JUNE, all along the coast of the Central Divi¬ 
sion, the southeaster blows furiously. 

Siai station is a little sheltered from the full 
force of these cool-season gales. Nevertheless, the 
long verandas of the Magistrate’s house are swept all 
day by a steady breeze; papers, if not weighted down, 
take wings; canvas blinds tear loose from their fasten¬ 
ings. Upon the iron cook-house roof the low young 
palms beat madly, with a sound as of a giant clapping 
hands. In the wonderful flame-tree and frangipanni 
avenue, planted long ago by some beauty-loving Presi¬ 
dent, the southeaster has its will; of windy mornings, 
sweeping up from a sea that is blue as scilla flowers, 
it riots among the blossoming tops of the trees, and 
spreads a carpet of scarlet and ivory, fit for a fairy 
king, on the coral-gravelled roadway. And still the 
trees—the weird, polyp-fingered frangipanni, the fea¬ 
thery flame-tree, with its blooms like red dragonflies— 
stand full of flowers; and still, each day, the scented 
shower is shed anew. And of those who see the wonder 
—a trader, a recruiter, coming to sign on boys; an 
official inspecting stations; some planter calling in to 
beg a case of benzine for his launch—not one in ten 
looks at it, or cares that it is there. 

Stacy Holliday, wife of the Magistrate of Siai, 
16 


BIRDS OF PARADISE 


17 


liked the frangipanni avenue. When her husband was 
away upon patrol—and of late his patrols had been 
extraordinarily long and frequent—she used to walk 
there often, treading upon the falling clusters of red 
and creamy flowers, and silently staring at the sea— 
the sea, blue as nothing else on earth can be blue, burst¬ 
ing out, in shouts of colour, from behind some peaked 
brown native roof or beneath some lattice of green 
palm. The beauty of Siai, of New Guinea as a whole, 
gave her little pleasure. It seemed too beautiful; it 
passed the saturation point of the esthetic sense. It 
was like saccharin for over-sweetness, like a high, thrill¬ 
ing, long-drawn violin note, singing and never ceasing. 
She wanted it to stop. 

She understood, now, how Papua burned the life out 
of people by means other than fever. She knew that 
all emotions in that land of fierce beauty and strong 
contrast were sharpened to a point almost unbearable. 
Even in the white settlements, there was incessant quar¬ 
relling; there was love-making—hot and primitive as 
that of the Papuans themselves; excitement, incredible 
to folk of cooler lands, about the smallest happenings 
of daily life. Out in the “bush,” the mind, abnormally 
active, thrashed like a ship’s propeller in the air 
for the want of its accustomed restraining medium of 
other minds and lives. Out in the bush, life was nak¬ 
edly simple, feeling starkly unmodified. Out in the 
bush was not a good place for people—for most people. 
Especially, it was not a good place for a woman who 
had made a mistake. 

In the long weeks of Holliday’s absences—those 
weeks that fret the heart and nerves of the Papuan 
official’s wife—Stacy, left alone in the care of half a 
dozen black police, had time to think. And the bur- 


18 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


den of her thinking, as she walked between the be¬ 
witched frangipanni trees, or down by the shore, where 
shells and shards of coral fled tinkling to the breeze, 
was always the same—It never should have been. 

She did not know which she hated most—the long 
stretches of utter loneliness, when, for weeks at a time, 
not a white face showed at Siai station save her own, 
staring dumbly at her in the shadowy glass, or the 
weeks in between, when Charlie was at home, with his 
endless demands on her time and attention—which she 
met willingly, as a small part of the debt she could not 
help owing him—and on her love, which she did not 
give at all. 

It seemed impossible for Holliday to recognize the 
fact. Stacy was a dutiful wife; beyond that, he did 
not appear to see. His egotism was so enormous as 
to fill his life from east to west and north to south 
again. He was proud of himself for having married 
a girl of good family and good looks; proud, when 
rare visitors arrived, of Stacy’s able housekeeping 
which enabled him to show off the resources of his 
home; proud, always and inevitably, of Charles Holli¬ 
day, of everything he said, did, and intended to do. 
The thought that any woman could be less than en¬ 
chanted to be Charlie Holliday’s wife and the mis¬ 
tress of his home could not have found lodging in his 
mind. 


It was Saturday afternoon, and a screaming windy 
day. The air swept so clean that it seemed to sparkle 
like Dantzic water the blue, blue sea down below the 
station, making fierce little combers on the reef-pro¬ 
tected beach. Holliday, in his office at the end of 


BIRDS OF PARADISE 


19 


the veranda, had finished trying a native case. He 
came out stretching his arms above his head, and vow¬ 
ing that he would not do another stroke of work that 
afternoon. 

Stacy, a little paler, a little thinner, than in those 
days of February at Port Moresby, was sitting with 
a bit of sewing in her hands, drawing the needle list¬ 
lessly in and out. She did not look up when her hus¬ 
band came out of the office; she only nodded her head 
as he spoke, and went on sewing. Presently she said, 
fastening off a thread: 

“You have a lot of work in arrears, haven’t you?” 

“And if I have,” asked Charlie, in a complaining 
tone, “whose fault is it? Can a man do two men’s 
work? I can’t be here making out reports and ac¬ 
counts and up in the main range at the same time— 
can I? I ought to have a patrol officer. Two. The 
patrolling’s enough to kill any one.” 

He looked very healthy, however, and a trifle fat, as 
he dropped indolently into a hammock, and reached 
for his cigarettes. Stacy, who had had her share of 
fever since the days of February, not to speak of 
mental worries worse than any malaria, looked much 
more worn than he. 

“Well, I believe,” she said, deftly twisting a hem 
with her left forefinger, “that there’s some chance of 
your getting one. I forgot to tell you, but the L. M. S. 
missionary from down the coast—what’s-his-name— 
called when you were away last week, and said he’d 
heard in Port Moresby they were going to send Mr. 
Rainsforth.” 

The hem gave trouble j ust then; she had to hold it 
tight in order to get the first stitches safely home. 
Presently it was running well, and she glanced up at 


20 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


her husband, to see why he had not answered her. SHe 
thought he looked extraordinarily pale. 

“Are you ill?” she asked. 

Holliday, holding an extinguished match to the tip 
of his cigarette, drew uselessly at the other end. 

“Oh—the damn thing’s out,” he said, without an¬ 
swering her. He took another match from the box 
and lit it. He held the cigarette between his hands— 
it was windy on the veranda—and drew at it carefully 
for a minute. 

“When did he hear that?” he asked, choosing his 
words with some care, and not looking at Stacy. 

“I suppose it must have been some days before. He 
wasn’t just in from Port.” 

“When did he think Rainsforth would - 

G-d-n!” 

Stacy winced at the oath, but said nothing. She 
had had time to learn that Holliday was not of those 
men who treat their wives as gentlewomen. Appar¬ 
ently, he thought she had in some degree lowered her¬ 
self by marrying him. At all events, he addressed her 
now much as he had been used to address women whose 
social position was doubtful or non-existent. Holliday 
was that cursed thing, a man with many manners. 

She did not ask him what the matter was. She saw 
—though she did not understand. 

Up the long vista of the frangipanni avenue, under 
the stars of bloom, were coming two white men. One 
of them was dressed for the bush in khaki shirt and 
trousers and felt hat. The other, in white helmet, 
starched white suit, and pipe-clayed boots, was clearly 
a Government official. 

Holliday swore. He swore again, under his breath, 
as the men approached the veranda. 





BIRDS OF PARADISE 


21 


“Just when I wanted a quiet afternoon,” he ex¬ 
plained, somewhat inadequately, as Stacy could not 
help but think. Had he not been grumbling, five min¬ 
utes earlier, about the hardships of having no patrol 
officer? And now that a man who could be nothing 
else was coming up the walk, he cursed, and bit his 
cigarette half in two. 

Stacy noted the discrepancy, but did not speculate 
about it. It was just Charlie. . . . 

Besides, one must hurry up and see about dinner. 
With two more men . . . She put aside her sew¬ 

ing, and got up to meet the guests, various dinner 
menus racing each other through her mind. Lucky 
she had that wild pig . . . were there any ripe 
custard apples? . . . she must have coconuts 
scraped at once for curry . . . and for pudding 

The best was 

Down the scurry of the southeast wind went the menu. 
Went the veranda, the house, Charlie sulking behind 
her, the ruffling coconut palms, the beach, the sea. 
Everything seemed to waver and fly in long shining 
lines. She had time, in one whirling moment, to won¬ 
der if this was what people called fainting. Then the 
world came to a standstill again, and she saw every¬ 
thing clearly instead of one thing alone—the thing 
she had seen, with smiting clearness, from the first—a 
face—the face of the man in khaki. 

It was a hard, clear-cut face with a very straight 
nose and two blue-and-gray splendid eyes looking 
vividly out. It was the face of the man in the picture 
—the man on the wharf. It looked at her recogniz- 
ingly, as one who meets a friend for whom he has been 
waiting long. And Stacy, married wife of Holliday, 
felt that she looked at it as it looked at her. And in 


22 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


her heart something sprang up with violence, like a 
ghost breaking forth from the tomb, and cried: “Too 
late—too late!” 

In such moments lives are fashioned or marred. 
Yet they pass for the most part unnoticed. Rains- 
forth, coming up on Plummer’s heels, saw nothing but 
a momentary hesitation on the part of the charming 
little hostess before she gave her hand to her guests 
and welcomed them, a trifle formally. Charlie Holli¬ 
day, rolling out of the hammock, saw nothing at all. 
As for Mark Plummer, he saw that Mrs. Holliday 
looked at him as one would like a pretty woman to look, 
and he felt a sickening pang of jealousy at the sight 
of her husband loafing forward. What else he felt 
was nothing new. He had known just how things were 
since the moment on Port Moresby wharf that had 
shown him, and taken from him, the vision of the woman 
he could have loved. 

Stacy said: “Oh, how do you do? Come in out 
of the sun—did you have a good trip down?” 

Rainsforth said the southeaster was blowing up, 
and they’d have a drought before long, if he knew the 
signs of the weather. 

Plummer said nothing, since, at the moment, he had 
no question to ask, nor any necessary statement to 
make. He did not often manufacture talk. 

Holliday said: “Have a drink?” And so the mo¬ 
ment that shaped three lives passed by as such moments 
do. 

It appeared, shortly, that Plummer and Rainsforth 
did not purpose inflicting themselves upon the narrow 
accommodation of the station residence. There were 
only three rooms in the house besides kitchen and 
veranda. But a few hundred yards away, just out of 


BIRDS OF PARADISE 


23 


sight beyond the palms, there was a patrol officer’s 
hut, empty. It had a rustic table and benches, and a 
cooking stove in the shed that served for kitchen. As 
Papuan travellers often do, the men had brought their 
own beds and mosquito-nets with them. It would be 
only for to-night, said Rainsforth. 

“They want me to start off right away in the morn¬ 
ing,” he stated, avoiding Holliday’s eye as he spoke— 
but that might have been because he was adjusting a 
bootlace. . . . “Number One is a bit ruffled about 

the delay in the station returns.” 

“I swear no man could have done more. Why-” 

began Holliday, who was looking curiously yellow. 

“Oh, yes, I know.” Rainsforth’s manner was a shade 
brusque—especially as addressed to a senior in the 
Service. “Oh, yes, my dear Holliday, of course no one 
could have kept up the station work when he was so 
very—so very industrious in the patrolling line as 
you’ve been. Well, they’ve sent me down to take that 
off your shoulders. Sit up nicely and thank the kind 
gentleman, won’t you?” 

Holliday threw him a look that had no thanks in it. 

“We’ll discuss matters later,” he said, in a tone 
meant to recall to the other his inferior position and 
rank. “Of course you’ll dine with us.” Stacy had 
slipped away, like Eve, “on hospitable thoughts in¬ 
tent.” 

“Thanks awfully,” agreed Rainsforth, with just a 
shade too much politeness. 

Plummer, who was watching the two, unobtrusively, 
as he filled an ancient pipe, came to the conclusion that 
there was something strained somewhere. 

“Well, we’ll see you at dinner,” said Holliday, whose 
manner seemed to be divided between irritation at the 



24 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


continued presence of his guest and relief at his ap* 
proaching departure. 

“Right!” was Rainsforth’s answer. “Are you com¬ 
ing, Plummer?” 

Ten minutes later, in the one bedroom of the little 
sago-bark house, known as the patrol-hut, the two men 
were watching their boys unpack. 

“These chaps savvy our talk?” demanded Plummer. 

“One never knows. Clear out! Abia, kareharega!” 
The natives went. 

“Well,” observed Rainsforth, scraping among mis¬ 
cellaneous clothes much as a terrier scrapes at a rab~ 
bit hole, “I can see you smell something.” 

“Yes,” said Plummer. 

“You can guess what’s wrong?” went on Rainsforth. 

“Accounts won’t balance?” 

“Other way round. Money flying free—and no de¬ 
ficiency. And yarns being told.” 

“Oh!” Plummer went on unpacking methodically. 
“I’ll change, since there’s a lady,” he said. “Other 
way round? Well, I suppose the station hasn’t got 
its name for nothing.” 

“It has not,” said Rainsforth, with emphasis. 

There was a minute’s silence; the sea, very near, 
drew back and forward among the rattling corals of 
the beach; the wind beat among the hanging edges of 
the low thatched roof. 

“It’s a damned shame!” spoke Plummer at last. 
“And a damned pity for his wife.” 

“Second man gone wrong here, this’ll be,” said Rains¬ 
forth musingly, pulling out a pair of shoes and toss¬ 
ing them on his camp bed. “Holliday doesn’t keep 
his prisoners in hand much,” he observed, “or the 
track from the jetty wouldn’t be in such a state.” He 


BIRDS OF PARADISE 


25 


pulled off his soiled white boots. “Wonder have I a 
chance of the station.” 

“What did they send you here for?” Plummer 
faced him. 

“Patrol officer,” answered Rainsforth, opening wide 
his rather shallow brown eyes and trying to stare 
Plummer down. 

“Rainsforth,” remarked the other, “you’ve been 
yapping, more or less, the whole way from Port. A 
Government officer shouldn’t yap. But since you’ve 
told me seven eighths of it, you may as well tell the 
other eighth. I suppose you’ve come here to sheet it 
home to him, and he knows it.” 

“Well,” said Rainsforth, self-excusingly, “the whole 
Territory will know all about it in a couple of days, 
and he’ll know when he opens his mail. He’s going 
back on the launch.” 

Plummer, taking out a worn tobacco pouch, and roll¬ 
ing a pipeful of “trade” in his hands to soften it, simply 
looked at him, with the courteous grave attention that 
was one of his characteristics. Rainsforth went reel¬ 
ing on: 

“If any one has a chance of the station, it ought to 
be me. It’s my turn—a long time my turn. And if I 
take charge, they can’t very well give it to any one 
else after. I can tell you things will be better done 
when I’m here. It’s a married man’s station, of course 
—generally been thought so—but as to that, I have a 
little girl down south—damn these bootlaces; the knot 
has got wet.” 

Plummer now spoke. 

“What happens to Mrs. Holliday?” 

“Mrs. Holliday?” parried Rainsforth, hopping on 
one leg as he pulled off his boot. 


26 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“If he goes to Port,” stated Plummer, curtly, “and 
you go on patrol, she’s left alone.” 

“You mean the Karakivas?” 

Plummer’s look assented. 

“Why—why—can’t she go up to Port with him, 
dash it all? Or stay, she’s been alone before.” 

Plummer, rapidly changing into a smartly tailored 
drill suit, did not seem to think this called for 
answer. 

“Well,” chattered on Rainsforth, scenting disap¬ 
proval, “it’s true they have been restless of late, more 
on account of the way he did—or didn’t do—his 
patrolling, than anything else. But I don’t suppose 

- Still, all the same- Well, what do you 

think?” 

He sat down on the edge of his camp bed and began 
pulling on a pair of clean white shoes, admiring the 
neat turn of his foot the while. 

Plummer, with his pipe in one corner of his mouth, 
remarked: “She can’t go with him. You know quite 
well it’s not one charge only.” 

“Well, my Lord! neither of them’s criminal any¬ 
how !” 

“Either’s dismissal. And you know-” He broke 

off. 

“Of course I do. Yes, come to think of it, it may be 
a pretty hot case. But I tell you, my orders are to 
start right away.” 

“I’ll stop here.” 

“In the patrol-hut?” 

“Yes!” 

“But, man! You were going up the Lakomai 
River!” 

No reply. 





BIRDS OF PARADISE 


27 


“But you’ll miss any chance you have of getting in 
before the rush. The Marsina will be full up to the 
rails when she comes in—and she’s due to-morrow. I 
tell you, Number One Office and all the little tin gods 
are on their hind legs about it. We’re going to have 
the biggest gold rush since the Yodda.” 

“Do you know what time it is?” 

“Time? I suppose about half-past five.” 

“It’s twenty-five to six.” 

“I say, though, is it? Dinner at half-past. We’ll 
have to hurry. Are you ready?” 

He went out, talking. Plummer followed him, after 
a swift minute which, with a grin at his own weakness, 
he employed in rapidly arranging his thick hair and 
twisting the ends of a moustache that was his secret 
pride—if he had any. He caught up with the other 
in a few yards, walking with the loose, wolf-like stride 
of one who has known long days of travel in rough 
country. The sea, turning to a cold and lonely blue, 
lay by them on the right, all laced with palms; the 
sunset wind went complaining down the frangipanni 
avenue, where they walked on fallen stars of ivory and 
flame. Up on the veranda of the brown, peak-roofed 
house one man of the two saw a light dress flutter 
away. 

“Got a touch of fever?” asked Rainsforth, who hap¬ 
pened to be looking at Plummer. 

“No.” 

“You turned white.” 

“A touch of heart,” said Plummer, calmly. 

“Oh. You should be careful of that. I remem¬ 
ber-” 

“I am. Or anyhow, I will be.” 

“Quite right,” said Rainsforth, patronizingly. He 



28 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


had to remind himself, now and again, for the sake of 
his dignity, that this man was of no class at all that 
one could define, and no particular occupation, unless 

-Yes, of course, he had discovered rivers, and found 

mountain ranges, and the Royal Geographical had- 

But anyhow, who wanted the rivers and the ranges? 
Plummer himself didn’t. He had found them by acci¬ 
dent, when he was out after gold with a pack of canni¬ 
bal niggers, and he didn’t make any use of them; no 
one could. And who were his people? Probably abso¬ 
lute nobodies. 

“Rainsforth,” said Plummer, suddenly, as they 
neared the house, “don’t tell that little woman any¬ 
thing. Don’t hint anything. She’s sharp.” 

“As if I should think for a moment of-” 

“Well, don’t.” 

“I won’t!” He was astonished to find himself reply¬ 
ing so meekly. 

It was an unquiet dinner—beneath the surface of 
things. Stacy, competent little housekeeper that she 
was, had no fears for the food or the service; the horn- 
bill-bread soup she knew would come in hot, the loin of 
roast wild pork would not be undercooked or the 
mango pie over-done; the coconut cream for the fruit 
salad would be squeezed with clean hands, and the 
knives not polished in her absence by an unholy proc¬ 
ess of spitting and rubbing on the floor. 

Nevertheless, the hostess—a little pale in her white 
lacy dress, smiling and sweet, making conversation, and 
trying hard to feel that every one was happy, and 
everything all right—found herself growing more and 
more certain, as the meal went on, that everything, 
somehow , was wrong. 

Rainsforth’s face told tales—it always did. He 





BIRDS OF PARADISE 


29 


kept looking at her, now and then, as if he knew some¬ 
thing she didn’t know, and was turning it over in his 
mind. Plummer’s countenance, to a man, would have 
been totally inexpressive; to a woman, and that woman 
Stacy Holliday, its determined blankness told almost 
as much as did the unrestraint of the other. And Hol¬ 
liday—Holliday was drinking. Not to drunkenness. 
He was never intoxicated, and prided himself on it— 
a significant fact. But now and again he took enough 
whisky to make him unbalanced, disagreeably voluble. 
This was such an occasion. 

Why was he doing it? Stacy, as the meal went on, 
found herself watching every one; trying to entrap an 
unguarded look . . . There was something. She 

was sure of it now. 

But the talking and the eating continued; coffee was 
brought; a move was made on to the southeast veranda, 
where the wind, lessened by nightfall, blew pleasantly 
among the mango tops beneath. There was no moon, 
the stars were very bright. You could see, away down 
below the house, the dim shining of the flowery avenue ; 
could just perceive a faint, exquisite scent of frangi- 
panni blossom bathed in dew. A night for lovers; a 
night for Juliet, for Jessica 

Something made her lift her eyes from the coffee 
cup she had taken in her hand. There was a lamp in¬ 
side the dining room; its light fell in an oblique stream 
through the doorway and passed across the veranda. 
Plummer’s face was full in the ray. His gray-blue 
eyes—too beautiful for a man’s eyes, if they had not 
been set in that strong, sharp-cut face—were looking 
her through. The mask worn all dinner-time was off; 
she read his thought. “I am sorry for you,” it said. 
And it said more. 


30 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Suddenly, she knew what he was thinking. She felt 
that she must put her knowledge to the test. 

“A lovely night,” she said, conventionally. 

“Yes,” said the gold-miner. He added, in a minute, 
“Like the ‘Merchant of Venice.’ On such a 
night . . .” 

It was proved. Stacy felt frightened, as she had 
felt when the two men had come up on to the veranda 
that afternoon, and the world had been shaken before 
her. She plunged into trivial talk. Plummer listened, 
and did not answer. His eyes—those deep-lashed, 
grave, attentive eyes—kept on her face. In the midst 
of a drowning attempt to discuss the recent bazaar in 
Port Moresby, she became conscious that the eyes were 
speaking to her, and that the thing they conveyed, 
again and again, was—reproach. 

She understood the reproach. She would always un¬ 
derstand this man. She wanted to say, out loud, in 
so many words: “How was I to know? I waited ever 
so long, and you never came. . . .” But what she 

did say was: 

“And they raffled the pig, and it was won by the 
doctor, but when the winner went after it, he found it 
had been killed and roasted by mistake for the supper 
at the dance. So-” 

“I’m going to read my mail,” came suddenly from 
Holliday’s end of the veranda, where he had been talk¬ 
ing, low-voiced, with Rainsforth. He got up, walked 
into the room used as an office, and shut the door be¬ 
hind him. 

A silence fell on the veranda. Back again, like a 
pendulum, swung Stacy’s mind, between its two points, 
to the other anxiety of the evening. What was wrong 
with Charlie? 



BIRDS OF PARADISE 


31 


Rainsforth, black-moustached, smiling, well-dined, 
came lounging over to her corner. 

“Holliday’s thinking of taking a run up to Port,” 
he said. “To-morrow—Black’s launch is coming back 
in the afternoon.” 

“Oh, how on earth am I going to be ready?” was 
Stacy’s innocent cry. The two men looked at one 
another. 

“Wouldn’t be worth your while,” offered Rainsforth, 
nipping the end off a cigar. “He can’t stay any time. 
Only business.” 

Plummer was silent. He did not avoid her eyes, but 
Stacy saw that he had, instantly, divested his face of 
all possible expression. Into her mind came a convic¬ 
tion that something was going to happen. The door 
of the office was shut; she could hear Charlie tearing 
papers inside, pushing a chair back. . . . He was 

coming out. 

The scene that followed seemed to her to be some¬ 
thing that she had always known and feared, while at 
the same time, impossible; it fell like a bolt of thunder 
from a blue-clear sky. Charlie came out of the office; 
he was bent up together, as if he were sick, and he was 
crying. Blubbering, booing, like a very little boy. 
And through the blubbering and booing, he kept say¬ 
ing: “It’s a damn lie. I haven’t one. I never sent 
a damn package away. They can’t touch me.” 

Rainsforth took a step forward; Plummer did not 
move from his seat, but he leaned slightly toward the 
chair where Stacy sat. Then Holliday recommenced, 

booing louder, “And I never went near any of the-” 

he began, but Stacy did not hear more. Acting to¬ 
gether, the two men sprang different ways, Rainsforth 
to Charlie, whom he seized by one arm, and Plummer 



82 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


to herself. In another instant the door of the office 
had closed again, with Charlie behind it, and Stacy was 
on the north veranda, where the meat-safe and ironing 
table stood, with Plummer beside her. If he had not 
had both hands in his pockets, she would have sworn 
that he had run her along with a hand behind her 
waist. 

“What’s—what’s the matter?” she said, breathing 
hard. 

“They think,” said Plummer, watching her, “that 
your husband has been smuggling birds of paradise 
out of Siai.” 

“But that means dismissal from the Service!” 

“They haven’t proved anything,” countered Plum¬ 
mer. He was leaning back against the veranda post, 
very tall, his hands still in his pockets, looking at her. 
The air seemed charged with dreadful things—part 
spoken, part unspoken—almost guessed at. . . . 

“Is there anything else?” asked Stacy. 

“You mustn’t,” replied Plummer, waiving the point, 
“mind what he said too much. He’d had—a little 
more than usual.” 

Then Charlie Holliday’s wife, who was, of necessity, 
familiar with the troubles that had shaken so many 
white officials from their seats, put her hands over her 
eyes, and dropped back into a chair that, somehow, 
found its way to her trembling knees just when they 
wanted it. She knew. 


CHAPTER III 


MAUD MULDER 

F OR near a week after Holliday’s departure 
Stacy wandered about her house half-stunned. 
The glorious southeast mornings, when the air 
was a river of pure gold, with the great green leaves of 
the bananas and the long plumes of coconut fluttering 
and flowing in it like water seeds in a stream, did not 
tempt her out from her dark, heavily blinded veranda. 
The dreaming afternoons, with that strange, lonely 
blue deepening on the sea, and the shattered peaks of 
the far, twelve-thousand-foot ranges painting them¬ 
selves, as the sun grew low, sharply, transparently, as 
pictures limned on glass, held no delight for her. She 
rose, she dressed, she ate the meals the boys put on the 
table, she sat with a book in her hands and did not 
read, she stared, not knowing that she did so, out 
across the mango tops and down the frangipanni walk, 
where all day long the flowers were blossoming, falling, 
and blowing along in the wind. If she thought of them 
at all, some vague simile may have drifted across her 
mind, comparing the flowers and their short life, their 
speedy drifting down the winds of chance and death, 
to herself and the fate that had overtaken her. Her 
marriage had been, so far, no great success. Now, it 
was a failure, a wreck, and she was wrecked with 
it. 


S3 


34 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Stacy had never been what ninety-nine out of a hun¬ 
dred women are, a self-deceiver. “Call pain, pain, and 
sorrow, sorrow,” she said, with Charlotte Bronte, who 
knew so much of both. Her mind, trained to grasp 
hard things, to lay hold on prickly things, in bygone 
college days, did not flinch away from hardness when 
it came in a different form, in the problems of her own 
existence. She knew quite well that a woman’s mar¬ 
riage is her life; that failure in that is failure in all. 
She did not attempt to make an exception of her own 
case. 

The common woman feels herself to be an exception 
to every rule; dispensed from every obligation that she 
does not like, freed necessarily from consequences that 
follow causes, from fours made by twos and twos, 
simply because she is herself. Stacy was not common, 
and so she bent, knowingly, to the common law, and 
demanded no miracles to be worked for her. 

Life was going to be a failure. Charlie was not 
only a bad husband in the ordinary, domestic sense; 
he was bad in the graver meaning of the word. The 
veiled hint about native women was plain enough for 
her understanding. Beyond the bitterness of this— 
and it was bitter, though she did not love the man she 
had married—lurked a further misery: the common, 
wretched fear of poverty, of distress. Holliday was 
certain to be dismissed. The laws against smuggling 
birds of paradise, which were protected by a special 
ordinance, and, consequently, paid well to poach, had 
been the downfall of many Government officials. She 
had not a hope that he could clear himself. Things, 
forgotten at the time, but now remembered, fitted in 
too well. Her husband’s heavy debts in Port Moresby, 
the strangely long patrols in the main range, about 


MAUD MULLER 


35 


which he never spoke when he returned—the mysterious 
luggers from Queensland that had called, once or twice, 
at Siai, bringing dark, foreign-looking men, who shut 
themselves up in the office with closed doors, on steam¬ 
ing hot afternoons, to talk to Holliday—the chattering 
of native carriers, going down the jetty with light 
bulky loads, from the back of the Magistrate’s quar¬ 
ters—all these things, now that she knew, told the 
story. He could not be put in gaol for the offence, 
but he could be heavily fined, and he would certainly be 
dismissed from the Service. If there had been the 
smallest doubt about dismissal, the whispers that had 
come to her of a native girl being carried off from her 
home, of a brother establishment somewhere down the 
coast, would have made it certain. Stacy clenched 
her small, capable hands when she thought of that last 
indignity. She grew scarlet, though she was alone. 
She did not feel that Holliday had degraded himself so 
much as that he had degraded her. 

What were they going to do? That was the prob¬ 
lem that sat with her at meals, lay by her side at night, 
and followed her all day long about the empty verandas 
of the echoing windy house. Charlie would be ruined 
by the fines. He would have to leave Siai at once. 
There would be rent, food, clothing to pay for, and 
nothing to pay with. And Papua was no place where 
a woman could get employment. And she had not six¬ 
pence of her own toward the costly steamer fare, if she 
thought of leaving her husband and returning to her 
mother; a course indeed that she did not fancy, since 
the role of the bad penny coming back was not one that 
appealed to her. Holliday might get a job as planta¬ 
tion overseer somewhere or other; but it was not 
likely. He was too unpopular; in a country where 


36 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


almost no one possessed a grandfather, he was too 
much inclined to stress his one poor advantage of long 
descent to reckon on public favour. If he got noth¬ 
ing— 

When she came to this point again, in the course 
of the round-and-round whirling of her wretched 
thoughts, she used to walk up and down the veranda, 
hands clasped behind her, head up, and lips whispering 
to herself: “I will not cry. I will not be a fool. Of 
course we’ll manage—somehow.” 

It was cold comfort. 

She did not think of Plummer much in those two 
days. Somehow, she felt that it would be better not 
to. She knew that he had stayed on in the patrol-hut; 
she didn’t know why, although the thought of his near 
presence comforted her vaguely. That he was stay¬ 
ing on her account, she never dreamed; still less, that 
he had deliberately thrown away his chance of fortune 
in the new Lakomai River gold rush, and stood to lose, 
moreover, all that he had spent in recruiting carriers 
and bringing them up the coast. If she thought about 
his plans at all, she concluded, in a general way, that 
he must be waiting for some one of the launches that 
pass, at longish intervals, up and down the lonely 
coasts of Papua. People, in Papua, are always wait¬ 
ing for something that sails the sea—if it is not a 
launch, it is a cutter or a schooner or a whaleboat; if 
it is none of these, it is bound to be one of Papua’s twin 
plagues and necessities, the steamers Marsina and 
Morinda. 

She said as much to Plummer, when she met him, 
coming up the veranda steps, on the sixth day after 
Holliday’s ill-omened departure. Now Mark, though 
he seemed to be lounging up the steps in the most casual 



MAUD MULLER 


37 


manner of an idle man who does not know how to pass 
his time, and had come to throw away a little of it with 
the nearest and only white person in the place—was 
there of set purpose. He had waited five days with¬ 
out seeing Stacy leave the house. On the sixth, he 
nodded to himself—he was not a man who talked alone, 
as many bushmen do—and silently made his way up 
the frangipanni avenue again. Mark Plummer knew, 
as only those know who have lived in the world’s lone 
places, what absence of company may mean when 
trouble is in the air. He knew the late rising to a 
weary day, the sitting about with hands hanging down 
and eyes staring at nothing at all; the strange fascina¬ 
tion of beds, sofas, lounges, anything that one could 
lie on, in the intervals of the wild pacing up and down 
that exhausted the body and hypnotized the mind— 
how one came, at last, to pass the day in alternate fits 
of stupor and semi-madness; how one saw strange 
things in corners as the light grew low. . . . He 

who was forty, and had spent ten years on the Papuan 
goldfields and up the Papuan rivers, he knew how 
many settlers and pioneers had gone out—that way. 
Thank God, there was no chance of such a thing in 
little Mrs. Holliday’s case. But it was time she was 
taken out of herself. 

Nothing of his thoughts showed in his face as he 
came on to the windy, shadowed veranda where the 
canvas chairs were flapping and bellying to the breeze 
like mimic mainsails, and the crests of the mango trees 
outside rolled and recovered like waves beaten in 
storm. On the contrary, he spoke lightly. 

“Right as rain,” he answered Stacy’s greeting. 
“Waiting for a boat? What else could one be doing? 
Did you hear what Bob Vicars said about that?” 


38 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


He had taken one of the bellying chairs, tamed its 
exuberance, and was sitting on it, Stacy on another 
beside him. He had swung his soft felt hat down be¬ 
tween his knees, and, leaning slightly forward, was 
looking, with grave eyes that seemed to consider things 
in general, at Stacy’s little, whitened face. She had 
turned in these six days to the colour of worn ivory. 

“Bob Vicars,” he went on, “used to play golf a lot, 
I believe, when he was a Sydney fellow with a lot of 
money. I don’t play it myself, but I understand there 
are more excuses going in golf than in any other game 
you could shy a stick at. Well, he says he used to 
get no end of fun out of sticking up his various mates 
on the links, one by one, and asking them sympatheti¬ 
cally : ‘How’s your game, old chap—I believe you are 
a little off, aren’t you?’ And every last one of them 
used to answer, with an astonished look: ‘Rotten, 
rotten, old man—but how did you know I was off?’ 
He says he bagged nineteen in one morning with that.” 

Stacy, who owned a few trifles in electro and silver, 
won on a southern links, was surprised into something 
like a laugh. 

“When he came here,” went on Plummer, “he missed 
his little joke—not being a man who had many. But 
he tells me he’s found a substitute, and it makes him 
quite happy. He has only to say to any man in the 
Territory whom he meets outside Port Moresby: 
‘Why didn’t the boat turn up?’ and he hears, at once, 
and with plain and fancy trimmings, what boat she was, 
and why she didn’t. And if that palls on him, he goes 
about asking people, in Port Moresby or Samarai, 
'When do you get your trip away? Going Home next 
year, aren’t you?’ And every one of them, man or 
woman, says yes. The number of white people who 


MAUD MULLER 


39 


didn’t go to London via Japan last year, because 
they’re going this year, is about the number of people 
in the Territory, more or less, and it’s the same num¬ 
ber that won’t go this year, because they’re going 
next.” 

“It sounds like Mam yesterday and jam to-morrow, 
but never jam to-day,’ ” quoted Stacy, for the sake of 
saying something. 

“Exactly,” said the gold-miner. “I don’t care for 
him, though—Carroll. Except his books on mathe¬ 
matics. They are bonzer stuff, some meat in them.” 

“What sort of books do you take with you to the 
fields?” asked Stacy. The listlessness was wearing 
off. The odd charm that Plummer’s personality had 
cast upon her filled the veranda like a scent or a sound. 

“Any sort. All one can get. Of course, you can 
fall back on Shakespeare or the Bible, at worst.” 

“Oh!” was the only comment that occurred to her 
upon this. Then—“How do you like them?” 

“I think the Bible an interesting book, but not suited 
to the young. I like Shakespeare’s story plays.” 

“And the historical?” 

“Too much yap,” said the miner, thoughtfully. “I 
don’t say it isn’t very good yap,” he added, quite with¬ 
out reverence. 

Stacy told the story about Oscar Wilde wanting to 
know what happened to poor old Paul. 

“What did happen?” was the calm reply. 

“He got off all right next day.” 

“I’m glad he did,” commented Plummer, gravely. 
“He was rather a good old blighter.” 

With a face like a section of iron-bark, he had been 
watching Stacy keenly all the while. “She’ll do now,” 
he thought to himself. “No getting the willy-willies 


40 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


this time. I wish I had the drowning—in a bag—of 
Charlie Holliday, damn him.” Aloud he said: 

“What about a stroll down the beach? It’s getting 
duskish—the sun won’t worry you.” 

“We might go and ‘wait for the boat’ there,” said 
Stacy, with the shadow of a smile. Mark Plummer, 
who seemed to have shot his load of talk for the pres¬ 
ent, rose at once, and held out his hand to assist her 
from the low chair. It felt very firm and warm; a 
hard, small hand with a curiously powerful grip. 
When she was up it held on for just a second, and then 
slipped, slowly, away. 

Stacy, in her seven-and-twenty years, had known 
what it was to have those slim, pretty hands of hers, 
with the pointed nails and dimpled bases to the fingers, 
squeezed, held, even kissed, a good many times. The 
men who had been her admirers, if they were not a 
marrying crowd, at least had been ready enough to 
take all they could get. And when a girl determinedly 
will not be kissed, her hands are made to pay. 

She had her fancies—what woman nearing the thir¬ 
ties has not? She had even fancied herself into a kind 
of love, once—perhaps twice. . . . Neither man 

was Holliday. 

But she could not recall the touch of any man’s 
hand, the feeling of any man’s grip of hers, save this 
man’s hand and hold. They were—different. They 
were, somehow, meant for her. Pinning on her hat, 
not without a glance at a glassed veranda door, in the 
absence of a mirror—picking up her sun-umbrella, to 
go down to the still sunny beach, she thought, quite 
calmly, of this. She looked at her hands; she was glad 
they were so pretty. 

The gold band on the left third finger struck her 


MAUD MULLER 41 

eye like a spark. She had actually forgotten she was 
married! 

The thought hurt shockingly. She could have flung 
herself on the ground and cried—cried as Charlie had 
done on that shameful evening that seemed six years 
ago rather than six days. Yes, she was married; she 
had married—that—while in the world was—this. 

“Oh, there’s something wrong with marriage,” she 
thought. “People kept saying so, but I never be¬ 
lieved them. One ought to wait. . . . Why didn’t 

IP” 

There was no answer. It came to her that thou¬ 
sands and thousands of wives must be asking themselves 
the same question—must be puzzling, as she was, over 
the undeniable fact that it is only by marriage that 
most women get the freedom, the opportunity, to find 
the “best of all.” A mocking freedom, truly! If she 
had waited till she was dead, in Australia, or in 
England, she would not, by that, have met Mark Plum¬ 
mer. She would only have stayed unmarried, wonder¬ 
ing where he was. 

“Oh, I give it up!” cried the girl to herself. They 
were down on the beach now; the loose corals were 
tinkling about their feet; the huge frilled shells of the 
giant clam, the strange, glassy oysters that are used 
for window-glazing; brown polished seeds large as 
purses; hunks of red coco-husk; purple slate-pencils 
from some dead sea-porcupine; yellow and ruby bells 
of the beach—hibiscus, clattered and rustled as they 
walked. The palm shadows, immensely long and deli¬ 
cate, wove witches’ nets over half the sloping, lime- 
white shore; the sun was low; great lakes and blots of 
yellow seemed to melt upon the fading blue of the 
lonely Coral Sea. 


42 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Stacy’s eyes were dazzled; she could not see much 
beyond the splendour of the sinking day. But Plum¬ 
mer, who seemed to have the unwinking gaze of an 
eagle, looked almost straight into the glow, and an¬ 
nounced : 

“There’s a boat—I bet it’s Tom Blazes coming 
here.” 

“Tom Blazes!” exclaimed Stacy. 

“Haven’t you heard of him?” 

“No. I couldn’t have forgotten such a name.” 

“It’s not his name. His name is Constantine Tom- 
bazis—he’s partly Greek. I believe Tombazis is a 
well-known name in Greece. But nobody in Papua 
ever calls him anything but Tom Blazes. One could¬ 
n’t, you know.” 

“Was he born here?” 

“Nobody was, Mrs. Holliday. You forget how 
young the country is. The only people who have been 
born here are the kiddies in Port Moresby school. 
Blazes was born in Queensland. His father was Greek 
and his mother Irish.” 

“I suppose,” commented Stacy, thoughtfully, “that’s 
one reason why they call him Blazes?” 

“Bull’s-eye! Greek and Irish mixed is a hot dish. 
He was a blackbirding captain till the Navy stopped 
it, and then he became mate of the Government steamer 
Empress in her fighting days, when she used to go up 
and down these coasts with a Maxim gun in the bows 
and a rack of rifles over the dinner table. Suited 
Blazes all right, but when they stopped fighting, and 
got a new steamer, and a lot of new officials, he took 
to trading. Blazes is a real villain, but you’ll like 
him.” 

“What do you think he’s coming in here for?” 


MAUD MULLER 43 

“Signing boys on or off, probably. I’ll take him in 
at the hut.” 

“I think I’d better go back to the house,” suggested 
Stacy. “You will both come to dinner, of course.” 

“Thanks very much.” 

“Good-bye. Thank you for coming to take me 
out.” 

“Good gracious, don’t say that. I wanted to. It 
isn’t worth saying good-bye. So long!” 

“So long!” 

Plummer, companioned by the inevitable pipe, 
strolled on toward the jetty. He was glad, on Stacy’s 
account, that Blazes had turned up; but he felt 
relieved that housekeeping anxieties were taking her 
out of the way for the moment. The schooner was 
coming from Port Moresby way; Blazes might have 
news. 

Ten minutes later, Stacy, head and shoulders in the 
store cupboard, heard some one calling her name from 
behind. She emerged, with her hands full of the inev¬ 
itable “guest” tins—peaches, ox-tongue, asparagus— 
and saw Plummer, looking hot, on the veranda behind 
her. He had evidently been running, or at least walk¬ 
ing very fast; his face was reddened, and a vein, V- 
shaped, stood out on his forehead. 

Instantly she sickened with the feeling that there 
was fresh calamity ahead. “What is it?” she asked. 
“Don’t break things—tell me.” 

He told her at once. 

“Your husband’s come back with Tombazis. He’s 
left the Service.” 

“Are they—has he-” 

“Nothing has been done. He was allowed to send 


44 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


in his resignation. The people he dealt with squealed 
on him, so there was very little inquiry. Of course he 
was heavily fined- 

44 Yes—about the other matter”—he spoke with 
simple plainness, the kindest course, as she could not 
help feeling—“there wasn’t much said. A missionary 
had sent in a complaint, and the Judge investigated 
it. They found the girl went of her own will, and that 
she’d been sent back to her village again. It’s in the 
Port Moresby paper. Look here, Mrs. Holliday—don’t 
you take it too hard. Mata was—an old friend—of 
Charlie’s years ago. She probably came after him; 
you don’t know those native girls. Put it out of your 
mind, and if you take my advice, don’t let him know 
you know, even.” 

Stacy could not answer him at first. She stood 
leaning against the cupboard, with her hands full of 
the tins that she had forgotten to lay down, and visibly 
fought for composure. The sun was almost down now, 
but a vivid yellow light lay in streaks on the nar¬ 
row road that passed the Magistrate’s residence. 
Along the road, under the bordering palms, native girls 
were going home to their villages; brown creatures 
with great puff-ball heads, bare bodies hung over with 
chains of beads and shells, bare thighs fringed lightly 
with grass skirts, prehensile monkey toes that clasped 
the ground. 

Charlie Holliday’s wife turned away, and set her 
lips. In silence she swung open the cupboard door 
again and began putting back the tins. She did not 
know what her fingers were doing, but the cupboard 
was tidy again in a minute, and in another she felt 
that she might dare to show her face again. 

“Thank you,” she made herself say. 



MAUD MULLER 


4 5 


Mark Plummer was still standing on the veranda. 
He had cooled down to his normal bronze-colour; he 
seemed to look at her almost indifferently, with his 
brilliant eyes hard set as shining stones beneath their 
smeared black brows. She could not guess at the tem¬ 
pest of anger, pity, hopeless love and pain, that was 
raging in the man’s breast. Mark and his face kept 
secrets. 

“I hear Holliday coming,” he said. “You won’t ex¬ 
pect us up to-night, Mrs. Holliday, but I’ll haul Blazes 
along in the morning. So long.” He gave her hand 
another of his hard grips—not lover-like, yet at the 
same time not merely friendly—and was away down the 
north veranda steps just as the Magistrate of last 
week, who was Magistrate no more, came up on the 
other side. The last thing Plummer desired was to be 
present at their meeting. 

What Holliday saw, when he came clumping noisily 
round the veranda to hunt for his wife, was a slim fig¬ 
ure standing very straight, with its hands clasped in 
front of it and a look on its set face as if it would 
rather be stoned to death than advance a step to meet 
him. He stopped and stared, his mouth a little open. 

What Stacy saw was a pitiful figure of ruin, a man 
who seemed to have lost an inch of height since he left 
the station; whose eyes had burnt-looking circles round 
them, whose hair, worn long and commonly brushed 
back in military fashion, was hanging wildly about his 
ears. His white suit was dirty—Charlie, who was such 
a “nut”!—and he did not seem to have shaved for at 
least two days. 

“Tatey,” he said, using his “little name” for her. 
She did not answer. She was not looking at him, as 
he stood there, but at the figures, in her memory, of the 


46 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


group of native girls, bare-thighed, bare-breasted, 
dressed in fringes of grass, padding along the road with 
naked monkey toes. 

Charlie Holliday, who had grown up somewhat less 
than most men grow up—which is never altogether— 
saw only that the refuge toward which he had been 
blindly travelling was being withdrawn from him; that 
the mother-heart in which his weak child-heart had 
trusted was closed and cold. He could not believe it. 
He stared with his burnt-out eyes, made a feeble, pitiful 
motion with his hands—Stacy saw, and hated herself 
for seeing, that the nails were black—and turned aside 
to cry. 

“Oh!” he said. There was desertion and despair in 
the wail—incredulity as well. “You, too!” it seemed 
to say. “I’d never have thought it.” He collapsed 
into a chair as if hamstrung, and put his fingers over 
his eyes. 

At this, all that was fine in Stacy sprang to the sur¬ 
face. She forgot his selfishness, his egotism; she for¬ 
got his rough carelessness toward herself, displayed as 
often as his rough affection; she forgot—even—the 
bare brown girls padding along the road. She saw 
only the man who was, after all, her man—he only, 
who had been the husband of her maidenhood, who 
might be—he only—the father of her children. And 
she saw him crushed to the ground. Charlie was down, 
and she, who prided herself so on her fairness, had, 
morally, kicked him as he lay! 

One moment she stood still, and through her mind 
flashed—as in a vision that takes but a second yet un¬ 
rolls the history of a life—the tale of all the days that 
were to come. She saw herself, a woman as other 
women, paying, in her marriage, for the sake of mar- 


MAUD MULLER 


47 


riage and the race, losing, as other women, her dreams, 
for the sake of the dream toward which the race was 
slowly groping its way. She remembered herself, at 
the altar, speaking the wonderful words of marriage 
with an ache at her heart, as so many millions of 
women had spoken them; yet speaking them with the 
full intent of carrying them out to the end. “For bet¬ 
ter, for worse. . . .” This was the worse; and 

it was no worse than millions had to bear. Her man; 
her child-man, who was so much more to her than any 
other man could be (she disregarded, with set teeth, 
the stab of that thought) was down; it was hers to 
help and raise him—now and always, as need might be. 

She crossed the veranda to Holliday’s chair, and put 
her hand upon the pitiful shaking shoulders. 

“Charlie, dear,” she said. 

He lifted a blubbered face, and flung his arms round 
her neck. 

“Oh, Tatey, I’m ruined, I haven’t a bean,” he said, 
“and I thought that you had turned against me, by 
God I did.” 

Stacy sat long beside him in the dusk, consoling him, 
quieting him, talking of possible, pleasant futures. 
He became more like himself after a while, and cheered 
up so far as to eat the dinner that the cooky-boy 
brought in with the lamps. Stacy quietly made sure 
that no more than a glass or two of whisky went with 
it. 

After dinner, greatly consoled, he took his pipe and 
the one more glass she allowed out on to the veranda, 
and sat in the lamp-light, tired, talking little, but 
almost content. And Stacy, working hard at her sew¬ 
ing to keep herself from thought, fought, all evening, 
against one of those obsessions that beset the per- 


48 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


sistent reader in moments of nervous strain. She had 
not taken down, for months, the volume of “Selections” 
that included haunting, sweet “Maud Muller.” Why, 
this night of all nights, must one of its verses—the only 
one she remembered—keep endlessly repeating itself in 
her tired, unwilling brain— 

And instead of him in the chimney lug. 

Dozing and grumbling o'er pipe and mug, 

A manly form at her side she saw. 

And joy was duty, and love was law. 


CHAPTER IV 


THE PLAN OF TOM BLAZES 

S TACY began next day by packing up. What 
they were going to do, she did not know; but it 
was certain that they could not remain in¬ 
definitely at the Government station, and equally cer¬ 
tain that, when the chance of getting away came to 
them, it would be the usual Papuan chance—some¬ 
body’s boat leaving in half an hour, “and could you 
please not keep her waiting, on account of the tide?” 
The furniture would be left, as was often done, for the 
incoming Magistrate to take over at a moderate valua¬ 
tion—it could not well be immoderate in this case, 
since the stuff was mostly made up out of cretonne and 
packing cases. Stacy’s small household goods—her 
table of silver oddments, her pictures, books, china— 
all the little home-making nothings that she had so 
happily arranged in the early days of her marriage— 
these must be put away in boxes, and made ready to 
remove. Clothes, too—but the little ornaments hurt 
her most. She had thought that, whatever else she 
was not getting in this marriage of hers, at least she 
was finding a home. And now it was not to be hers 
any longer. The small pigs and cats of china, Lucy 
Kemp Welch’s “Ponies in the New Forest,” the pierced 
silver bonbon dishes, as they dropped into their nests 
of newspaper and straw, seemed to make mocking faces 

49 


50 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


at her, and whisper, while she covered them and 
wedged them—“You thought we were going to stay for 
years and years, did you? Yah, silly! We’re off 
again, and so are you.” 

Holliday, seized by a fit of belated energy, was more 
than busy harrying the station police and driving the 
station prisoners, criminals from the main range un¬ 
dergoing jail, into a grand, detailed, and mostly super¬ 
fluous tidying up. 

“That damned pup Rainsforth shan’t have anything 
to say about the way the place was kept when he 
comes to take over,” he declared, driving a squad of 
cannibal murderers on to the station tennis ground, 
with directions, shouted loudly, about the taking out 
of every weed. “I’ll have a barrel of lime-wash made,” 
he said. “See to it, Corporal Gadaisu; I want all 
those stones bordering the track to the barracks 
painted white by the afternoon. Nothing like a nice 
lot of white stones to give a smart look to a station.” 

The Corporal, in his smart tunic and jumper of 
navy edged with red, and his military-looking bando¬ 
lier, saluted carelessly, and dragged his feet, in the 
fashion used by Papuans to express insolence, as he 
went away. He, and every other native in the place, 
knew that the Chief was broken. 

Holliday pretended not to notice. He was busy 
ordering out a couple of men who had been concerned 
in roasting a woman alive, at the back of Mount Yuke, 
and telling them to tidy up all the graves in the little 
cemetery “nicely,” and afterward to go in and help the 
cook, when Stacy saw, in the distance, Plummer and 
another man coming up to the station. She called to 
Holliday, and went into her room. Last night was 
last night, and she meant every bit of it, but one simply 


THE PLAN OF TOM BLAZES 51 

had to know how one was looking when visitors 
came. 

One was looking better than could be expected, on 
the whole—but it would be well if there was time just 
to slip off the white dress and on the pale blue—and 
to dash a flick of powder in the right place—and loosen 
a wave of hair. There was time. 

Holliday had entertained the visitors for not more 
than a couple of minutes when Stacy, fresh, pale, smil¬ 
ing, came out from her room, and found two men, 
Plummer and a stranger, seated at the table that the 
boys were setting for eleven o’clock tea. Both rose to 
their feet. 

“This is Captain Tombazis, Mrs. Holliday,” said 
Mark Plummer. “And the hardest case in Papua.” 

“Tom Blazes, ye mean,” said the Celto-Greek, with 
just a trace of accent. “I’ve forgotten I ever had any 
other name. Pleased to meet you, madam.” 

He looked hard at her with his starting pug-eyes, 
and Stacy felt that she was being judged. 

“Madam,” he said in a moment, bowing with one 
hand on his heart, after a fashion more Greek than 
Irish, “if there’s any way in which I can serve you, 
just do me the pleasure of mentioning it, and if I don’t 
carry it out within half an hour, ye may cut m’ heart 
and liver outa me, and throw them to the flamin’ 
sharks.” 

Stacy, a trifle amazed at such a form of address, 
observed the speaker narrowly. Tom Blazes was of 
good height, dwarfed somewhat by fat. His legs were 
like two barrels up-ended; his loose shirt, worn without 
waistcoat, curved out over such a promontory of flesh 
that an instant nervousness as to the anchorage of his 
trousers was bound to seize, and did seize, upon any 


52 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


casual observer. His hands were as hairy as taran¬ 
tulas; in his face, fat, deprecating, peaceable-looking 
in the last degree, there was yet an expression—im¬ 
possible to say what—that suggested something for¬ 
midable. In consequence, something strong. Stacy 
was sure that his odd offer had been made in earnest. 

“Oh, well,” she said, laughing a little, and trying to 
show appreciation, “suppose you tell Mr. Holliday and 
me what we’re going to do next; we should so like to 
know.” 

Mr. Tombazis took this, as he seemed to take most 
things, seriously. He goggled for a moment, appar¬ 
ently thinking, with such efforts that Stacy could 
fancy she heard the machinery of his brain creak and 
rattle. Then he turned away from her, and addressed 
Plummer. 

“What d’ye think?” he said. 

Plummer apparently understood him, for he nodded. 
“I had it in my mind,” he said, “but-” 

Tombazis made an indescribable sweeping gesture. 
It swept away, determinedly, every possible objection 
on the part of any one, to something not yet named. 

“Among us,” he said, “among us, we could surely 
_ 

“What can you put up?” demanded Plummer, 
crisply. 

“I happen,” said Tombazis, with dignity, “at the 
moment, to be out of funds, but shortly I expect-” 

“Of course,” said Plummer. “One always does, I’ve 
noticed. But what have you got—besides cash which 
you haven’t?” 

“I have got the boat,” said Blazes. “And the crew, 
and rations for them for a month.” 

“Benzine!” snapped Plummer. 





THE PLAN OF TOM BLAZES 


53 


“Plenty.” 

“I’ve got my carriers—and rations for them.” 

“Are they,” asked Tombazis, cunningly, “ eastern 
boys, by any chance? Yassi Yassis, or-” 

“You seem to know a lot. But I’d remind you they 
were got for-” He bit his sentence off. 

“I know you got them for mining,” declared the 
other, to Plummer’s obvious anguish. “But if they are 
good eastern boys of the right kind, aren’t they all the 
same just what we want?” 

“Yes,” agreed Plummer, “since you know so much, 
they are.” 

“Well, then!” declared Tombazis, “let’s answer 
Mrs. Holliday’s question—shall we? You know,” he 
added, with a would-be sly expression, “there ought to 
be a good bit of stores here. White man’s stores. 
Just what we-” 

He broke off, on some private signal from Plummer. 
Stacy, enlightened by the events of the last few days, 
guessed that Blazes had been about to make some re¬ 
mark on the liberal hospitality of the station. . . . 

Yes—she remembered her own astonishment at the 
scale of living insisted on by Holliday. She had not 
known how it was that his salary went so far. . . . 

She knew, now. 

“The truth is,” said Plummer, speaking with the 
curt directness that seemed especially his own, “the 
truth is that Blazes and I have had something on this 
a long time; an island I took up because it might pay. 
Blazes thinks, and he’s quite right, that we might take 
you two into it.” 

“Why?” asked Stacy. “It seems as if you wouldn’t 
get much—nobody’d get much—out of taking us into 
anything.” 





54 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“I’ll tell you what we’d get. We should get what we 
want and haven’t the cash to pay for at present— 
white men’s stores—and we’d find you simply invalu¬ 
able, if you would overlook the cooking and so on. 
Men crack up in this country because they’re starved 
into it, nine times out .of ten.” 

“What’s the island, and where?” demanded Holli¬ 
day, with his unfailing want of tact. 

Plummer did not appear to hear him. 

“It will be a near thing,” he said, thoughtfully. 
“We ought to have—but there’s no use wishing that.” 

“Ought to have what?” persisted Holliday. 

“Money,” answered Plummer. 

“Who’s talking about money ?” said a voice below the 
veranda. 

Stacy jumped, and Holliday let out one of his coarse 
oaths. If Mark Plummer and Tombazis were sur¬ 
prised, they did not show it. They sat where they 
were, and waited for events. Stacy jumped to her 
feet. “I believe I know the voice,” she said, and 
leaned over the rail. 

“Well, An-a-sta-tia,” said a gay voice below, “am I 
to come up or not, and did you or did you not ask me 
to come and stay with you?” 

Mrs. Holliday, a picture of guilt, stood motionless 
for half a minute. “It’s N}^dia Leven,” she said in a 
low voice, “and, Heaven forgive me, I did ask her, and 
forgot about it.” She hurried down the steps. 

“Damn Nydia Leven,” was Holliday’s comment. 

“Who is she?” asked Mark. 

“Female my wife met on the boat. She was staying 
a week or two ago at the L. M. S. Mission station 
down the bay. I suppose they’ve just handed her on 
to us. I thought I heard native singing a while ago— 


THE PLAN OF TOM BLAZES 


55 


it would be the mission launch. Oh-” He said what 

he thought of the mission, the launch, and Nydia Leven, 
at some length. 

“Shut it,” said Tombazis, with sudden briefness. 
“She’s coming.” 

And Nydia Leven, followed by a startled and unwill¬ 
ing hostess, made her entry. 

Nydia never did come into a room, or on to a ve¬ 
randa. She made entries. 

She was a small woman, with a small foot and a slim 
upright figure. She was very definitely golden—you 
could not get beyond her hair at first. Real gold hair 
remains one of the most uncommon beauties on earth, 
and Nydia had it, the genuine thing. When she was 
fronting the light, it shone as if new-gilt with gold¬ 
beaters’ leaf. When she was between the light and 
you it took on a sort of rainbow iridescence about each 
separate hair that encircled Nydia’s face in a gay halo 
of fairy beauty. 

Nydia liked to get the sun behind her when she made 
one of her entries. It was behind her now, and she ad¬ 
vanced, with rather more self-confidence than usual— 
not being, as a rule, troubled with diffidence. When 
you got a good look at her face, detaching it, men¬ 
tally, from its wonderful framing, you saw that it 
was commonplace. But Nydia knew how to carry off 
her face. She made it, by sheer dint of audacity, 
good-looking. One felt that a woman who made such 
entries, who held her head so excellently and smiled 
such a slow, gracious, beautiful-woman smile, must be 
beautiful. 

Stacy, a little less bright-mannered than usual, in¬ 
troduced the guest as Miss Leven. 

If Nydia had the usual allowance of brains—and it 



56 


THE SANDS OF OHO 


is to be supposed that she had—she could not have 
avoided seeing that she had arrived at an awkward 
time. But if that were the case, she gave no sign of 
her knowledge. It is probable that she thought her 
own presence sufficient compensation in itself for any 
trouble or embarrassment it might cause. 

Opening her eyes very wide—a sign, with her, that 
she meant to be sprightly—she advanced on the silent 
party. She was a young woman, not yet thirty, and 
she dressed as if she were not yet twenty, in the short¬ 
est and tightest of muslin skirts, puffed baby sleeves, 
and a frilly hat that seemed to cry out for a perambu¬ 
lator. All her clothes were of the best, and she had 
some jewellery—not exactly too rich or too much—dis¬ 
posed about her person. 

“Well, good people,” she exclaimed, “what is all this 
I am hearing about money?” 

Nydia Leven had a tinkling voice which she would 
have called silvery; she wore things that tinkled about 
her dress; she laughed like a rather dull glass being 
struck by a rather heavy spoon. She was crystalline, 
metallic all over. You felt that if you had suddenly 
hit her, she would have clashed. 

There was an awkward silence. Nydia’s boys were 
at the moment bearing her luggage up the veranda 
steps, down which Mrs. Holliday had, that morning, 
caused much of her own belongings to be taken away. 
Nydia, if she had eyes to note the atmosphere of pack¬ 
ing, the feeling, less tangible, of something wrong about 
the place, did not choose to comment upon either. 
For a moment Holliday looked at Stacy, and she at 
him, and neither knew how to begin. 

It was Plummer, with his unfailing tact, who bridged 
the awkward moment. 


THE PLAN OF TOM BLAZES 


57 


“We’re discussing the grub-staking of a treasure- 
hunt,” he stated. 

Nydia instantly took fire, as Mark may have antici¬ 
pated. 

“Treasure-hunt? How ripping!” she exclaimed. 
“Where? When? Oh, do let me go, too!” She 
seated herself with grace—Nvdia’s gracefulness was so 
unfailing that it made one want to slap her—and be¬ 
gan to use the fan she carried. Her eyes, meantime 
—brownish eyes of no particular beauty—were en¬ 
gaged in a sidelong observal of Mark Plummer. Stacy 
saw that; saw, also, how Nydia’s hand, unconsciously, 
went up to her hair, adjusting and pulling out a tress 
of wavy gold. She began to wonder why she had ever 
thought she liked the woman enough to ask her to stay. 

Plummer, if he were, commonly, among the most re¬ 
served of men, could open out completely when he 
thought good to do so. 

“It’s an island,” he answered her, “down toward the 
Dutch boundary, and not awfully far from the Queens¬ 
land side. If I hadn’t had something else on hand, I 
meant to have gone down there some time ago, and 
hunt about for what I think is in the place. Well— 
I’ve dropped the other thing for a moment. I think 
it’s as good a time as any other to go and look up the 
island. Mr. and Mrs. Holliday are coming with Tom- 
bazis and me; it’ll be a nice little picnic, with nothing 
dangerous about it. But we’ll all have to camp on the 
island for quite a good while maybe.” 

“Why?” asked Stacy, who did not want to leave all 
the conversation to Nydia. 

“Because,** said Plummer, coolly, “I don’t mind hav¬ 
ing a picnic party—I like it—but I’m not going to let 
any one go away again once we’re on the plactf*. till 


58 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


I’ve found what I want, or—well, not till I choose. 
Birds can carry secrets in this country—or winds. 
Any one who comes may as well agree to the conditions. 
That is, providing we go at all.” 

“What’s the doubt about it?” asked Nydia, neglect¬ 
ing her fan. 

“We’re about a hundred pounds short of what we 
want,” replied Plummer. 

Nydia’s reply came after a moment’s consideration. 

“What share will you give me if I put it up?” she 
said. 

“One fourth. There may be nothing in it.” 

“One fourth will do,” stated Miss Leven, in a tone 
entirely businesslike. Then she dropped, without ef¬ 
fort, back into her pretty woman style, and shook her 
fan at Tombazis. 

“And is this famous pirate going to lead us?” she 
said. 

Most men would have been pleased to be so described, 
but Blazes came too near the real article to like being 
compared to it. 

“I’m running the ship, madam,” he replied, somewhat 
curtly. 

“Ah, then, we shall be all right,” flashed Nydia. 
“They say no one knows the reefs of the West as Cap¬ 
tain Tombazis does.” 

It was true, and Blazes softened. 

“We’ll have luck, at any rate, with you on board, 
madam,” he declared. 

“Is there any reason,” asked Nydia, “why we should¬ 
n’t know what the treasure is?” She addressed Plum¬ 
mer this time. 

The three others looked anxiously at him. They 
had all been wanting to put this question, but- 



THE PLAN OF TOM BLAZES 


59 


Plummer hesitated a moment, and then said, “No.” 

“What is it?” The silvery note was very promi¬ 
nent in Miss Leven’s voice. Plummer, nevertheless, 
seemed quite unimpressed by it. 

“It’s a cache of pearl-shell and maybe pearls,” he 
said, with something of an effort. “The name of the 
island nobody’s going to know till we get there.” 

“What makes you think-” began Holliday. But 

Plummer was continuing. 

“I bought it for a song from a man who had it from 
a Jap who died there—he was the Jap’s nearest rela¬ 
tive, a half-caste fellow. I was at Daru when the 
half-caste chap blew in, and wanted to raise money 
for a boat to get back to Thursday Island. He was 
broke, and nobody would trust him; he was begging his 
tucker. He had the papers from the Queensland Gov¬ 
ernment, granting him the island, right on him, and 
was offering them to any one who’d buy.” 

“Oh, why wouldn’t any one?” cried Nydia. “A 
lovely coral island.” 

“Well, up in New Guinea we aren’t awfully keen on 
lovely coral islands. We see too much of them, and 
know too much about what they cost in transport,” 
said the miner. “But as it happened, I’d been down 
in Thursday Island a few months before that, and I 
thought the place was worth having. You see, the old 
Jap was one of Wyvern Brothers’ divers, and they’d 
been losing pearl-shell to no end, and couldn’t trace it. 
And a mate of mine told me he’d seen the Jap up near 
this island, when he was after beche-de-mer on one of 
the reefs, and had got blown out of his way. And I 
put two and two together, and I bought it. Went 
down to T. I. immediately, and had the transfer prop¬ 
erly registered. They thought I was after gold, and 



60 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


laughed at me—because any one could see it isn’t the 
place for minerals. But I took it on. And no one has 
known anything about it until to-day.” He looked at 
Miss Leven as he spoke, and Stacy, with a pang of 
foolish jealousy, realized that Plummer felt himself 
bound, by Nydia’s money, to tell her all that he had 
hitherto kept from the other members of the party. 

“I’m glad he didn’t tell the name,” she thought. 
“At least!” 

“We’ll have to run the boat back to Port for a good 
load of benzine,” went on Plummer. “And we can lay 
in some tents and a diving suit—that’ll have to be got 
from T. I. by the way. We’ve stores enough. It was 
the other things that were bothering me. A diving 
outfit runs easily over the hundred; but I know where 
to lay hands on an old one that’ll be good enough. Is 
it a go?” 

“It is,” said Nydia, holding out her hand. Plum¬ 
mer took it, and gave it a hearty shake. 

“Then we’ll leave to-morrow,” said Plummer. 

“Don’t you have to stop for them to take over, Hol¬ 
liday?” demanded Tombazis. 

“Damned if I do,” said Holliday. “They can make 
out their dashed accounts and returns as they like for 
themselves, when they send any one down. I’m off.” 

“We’re all off,” said Plummer. 

“Off to the mysterious treasure island!” cried Nydia, 
striking a theatrical pose. 

But in Stacy’s mind a curious doubt was finding 
place. How was it that a man of Plummer’s conspicu¬ 
ous honesty did not see that the shell of Wyvern Broth¬ 
ers, if found, would not justly belong to him? And 
if he did see it, as she was almost certain he did, what 
was behind ? What was he hiding ? 


CHAPTER V 


SHELLS AND PEARLS 

A LONG way out from land Tombazis’s schooner, 
the Kikenni , rolled and wallowed in the unquiet 
waters of the Coral Sea. They had a fair wind, 
but the Gulf of Papua, away to starboard, was cook¬ 
ing its own weather, after its unholy habit, and the odd 
remains that it threw out were of a nature to upset the 
going right down to Bramble Cay. It was coming on 
to night, the night of an unquiet day, and Stacy, just 
recovering from the seasickness that had held her for 
half a week, was lying in a deck-chair placed upon the 
hatch, watching the blue white-capped seas turn dull 
and sad; the western sky, far off, lighted up with 
Papua’s furious sunset fires. She had never been far¬ 
ther along the coast than Siai station; the impending 
gloom of the Gulf and its surroundings, the sensation 
of touching the very world’s end, of coming to a place 
where anything, anything at all might happen, was 
new to her. Whether she liked it or not, she could not 
tell. She did not know, even, whether she was pleased 
with this wild treasure-hunt, or only troubled, as a 
home-loving bird might be, thrown out of its nest. 
For, after all, Siai had been her nest, the home she had 
paid for, dearly enough, with the sacrifice of her free¬ 
dom, her power to choose a man among the world of 
men, and she had loved it, in a way. 


61 


62 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


She could have imagined circumstances under which 
this quest, with its adventure and romance, might have 
been glorious. If she and Love had been faring forth 
together, over Papua’s wild seas—what light, then, had 
gilded these darkening waters; what marches and meas¬ 
ures of triumph had sounded, for her, and for an¬ 
other, in the loud drums of the following southeast 
wind! One after another, New Guinea’s love stories, 
as she had heard them, rose before her mind—the tale 
of the singing man who left the stage and came to this 
world’s end land to find a home; of his wife, the little 
gold-haired musician girl, and how she followed him to 
his palm-leaf house up the lonely river, and died there, 
in his arms . . . the tale of the girl who loved a 

man irregularly divorced, and how they wandered up 
and down the coasts of Papua, and to Queensland and 
here and there and everywhere, but found no one who 
would marry them, and the end—but that must not be 
told, though Stacy could have told you . . . the 

tale of the woman who had heard of a certain man, a 
daring spirit of the country, and longed to see him; 
while the man, who had seen her picture, was always 
thinking of and longing for her—and how by a strange 
chance they met, in this very Gulf of Papua, and how, 
because they had been years seeking and finding, Death 
had met one of them first, and set his mark on that 
one; how they looked into each other’s eyes, with the 
face of Death between, and held hands, till one cold 
hand let the other warm hand go; and so to rest—and 
to wait. . . . Tale after tale, they passed through 

her mind. She wondered that they were all unhappy, 
being too young to know that all love tales worth the 
telling are sad tales. And all the time, as she thought, 
and dreamed, one figure, like the sunset shadow of the 


SHELLS AND PEARLS 


63 


Peak that lies across a hundred miles of Teneriffe, lay 
across her dreamings; and it was no shadow, but a liv¬ 
ing man. It sat like herself, in a deck-chair; it swung 
to the ceaseless motion of the ship; it held a book in its 
hand, but Stacy knew, somehow, that the eyes hidden 
beneath the wide Australian hat were not all busied 
with reading; that every now and then, safely shielded, 
they found a moment to glance her way. 

The Kikenni was a little boat; only the width of her 
deck lay between Stacy and that chair. Only the 
width of the deck lay between her and another chair, 
with another figure in it; a figure that did not read, 
but lounged, half asleep, mouth open. She could rise 
at any moment, and, in three steps, reach either of the 
chairs. There was thin air, only, separating her from 
the two men who sat so near. Yet, if she wished to go 
to one, and set her hand upon his shoulder, so that 
he might turn round, and look her full in the eyes, 
a wall, invisible and hard as glass, rose up to sep¬ 
arate them. . . . Some women broke such walls 

—they were breakable. . . . Not Stacy—she 

would shrink beneath the brand of the scars left by the 
breaking. 

As for Holliday, if she were to go over to him, and 
lean on his shoulder, all the forces of civilization would 
go with her, and push her along. Holliday himself 
would, probably, ask her to bring him a lemonade, and 
give her a careless kiss. Had he learned, in these few 
days, that another man was looking at her as a man 
looks at a woman found desirable? Probably. Holli¬ 
day would not care—much—he was very sure of him¬ 
self, and of her. 

“What right has he to be so sure?” thought Stacy, 
almost angrily. She knew herself to be among the 


64 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


women who, once married, do not throw caps over wind¬ 
mills. But somehow she was piqued that Charlie 
knew it. 

The schooner wallowed on, all sails stowed, her little 
kerosene engine alone keeping her on her course in the 
midst of the heavy broken seas. A long way off to the 
right the level, blue-green coast-line showed against a 
gray Gulf sky. There were no white people behind 
that line, or, at most, one in fifty or a hundred miles. 
There were no towns, no roads; only the long beaches 
thrashed by the southeast wind, and the native huts, 
and behind, black, formless Papua. 

She thought of the crowds of Sydney; of railway 
stations, theatres, of Manly and Bondi beaches, creep¬ 
ing with humanity. . . . How could anything 

matter—much—that happened there, in the midst of 
so many, many white people ? 

How could anything help mattering, terribly, out of 
all proportion, up here, in a land where everything was 
stressed to breaking point by the concentration of all 
interests, all happenings, in one narrow circle? Here 
were she and Charlie, and that other, and Blazes, and 
the tinkling Nydia, tossed together in fifty foot of 
shipping, and for hundreds of miles about them the 
sea and the long beaches and the forests, and again 
the forests and the beaches and the sea. No more. 

She wondered, not that there were quarrellings, 
fierce hatreds, and wild loves among the few whites of 
the country, but that the quarrels were not fiercer, the 
loves even wilder. There was something maddening— 
like the medieval torture of water drops falling ever in 
one place—about this concentration of a few white 
souls, whirling, ceaselessly whirling and beating, one 


SHELLS AND PEARLS 65 

upon another. It frightened her. It made her want 
to escape. 

“We’ll have it calmer from this on,” said Blazes, 
suddenly appearing from his tiny charthouse, and bal¬ 
ancing himself with amazing lightness for so stout a 
man upon the plunging deck. He looked more than 
ever like a pirate—a theatrical pirate—dressed, as he 
was, in an immense white shirt with immense blue trou¬ 
sers held by a scarlet sash. Tombazis reeked, in ap¬ 
pearance, of that stage on which he never had set foot. 
His attitudes, his gestures—all entirely natural— 
were, at the same time, of the essence of the theatre. 
He stood in slanting postures, hands flung out; he 
threw back his head; he made confidences with one 
hand to his lips, pondered, with fingers on his fat 
shaven chin. . . . Just now, announcing the prob¬ 

able change of weather, he demanded attention with 
one finger raised; he shook his head back and laughed, 
condemning the skies. 

“Going to take her through?” demanded Plummer, 
looking up from the book over which he had been watch¬ 
ing Stacy Holliday. 

“Certainly,” agreed the Captain, with a stately 
bow. 

“To-night?” queried Holliday, suddenly waking up. 

“Certainly!” 

“Have it your own way,” observed the ex-Magis- 
trate. “I suppose you know what you’re about.” 

“We shall make Oro in the morning,” pronounced 
Blazes. 

“Or hell,” amended Plummer coolly. 

“Is there any danger?” asked Nydia Leven, who had 
clawed her way, parrot-wise, from her cabin, when she 
saw that a conference was afoot. 


66 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“Last time I was down here,” said Holliday, “I came 
in that little Dutch boat they had on the Thursday 
Island run for a while. We went through these cays 
that are coming, at two in the afternoon. The captain 
had a man in the crow’s nest, and a leadsman in the 
bows, all the time, and the engines ran quarter-speed. 
We got bushed, and the bally ship sat on her tail and 
bleated. Nobody answered her, because there was no¬ 
body nearer than T. I., so she anchored, and got away 
in the morning again, and by and by they saw some¬ 
thing, so they got their bearings, and went through.” 

“What did they see?” 

“New Guinea. Thought it big enough to go by.” 

“And that’s the place the Captain is taking us 
through in the dark ?” 

“Exactly,” answered Holliday, who was by no means 
wanting in physical pluck however short he might be 
of moral courage. 

And through the reefs in the dark, in a sudden, 
ominous, break-watered calm, went Blazes all that 
night, singing, as he conned the ship in some impossi¬ 
ble way; smoking cigarettes without a pause; smelling 
his road from knife-edged reef to reef, among treacher¬ 
ous atolls, flats of coral lying awash, sandbanks, up- 
springing “horseheads,” splintered coral pyres. Stacy, 
lying in the coffin-like bunk above Nydia’s that was her 
only bed, could not sleep for anxiety; she did not take 
her clothes off all night. Through the moonless dark 
went the little Kikenni, chunking steadily. And Blazes 
sang. His formless, immense baritone voice went out 
over the waters, blaring tender entreaties, shouting 
soft nothings. 

“Leave me no more! love, sing me to sleep,” he voiced, 
like an Atlantic syren, as they slid past wicked Bram- 


SHELLS AND PEARLS 


67 


ble Cay in the faint starlight, almost, but not quite, 
gutting the Kikenni on those infamous coral claws. 

“Somewhere a voice is calling, 

Calling for me,” 

he shouted, gloriously, to the empty heavens, swinging 
his ship, with a sudden flirt of the wheel, off a line of 
pale grinning teeth that arose from nowhere and 
snapped, slantingly, at his bows. When Stacy, wake¬ 
ful-eyed, saw the dawn beginning to point above the 
bulwark. Blazes, harrying his black crew, was driving 
the schooner, now under sail again, through a gut of 
dark water that traced its one passage in a spider-web 
of spuming white; he had rolled his sleeves up to the 
shoulder, taken a reef in his red belt, and was singing, 
loud and furiously— 

“Just breathe my name to the woodlands. 

Whisper, and I shall hear V* 

She fell asleep at last, with the dawn in her eyes, 
Tombazis’s wild song in her ears, and the chuckle- 
chuckle of the water along the Kikenni's keel sound¬ 
ing ceaselessly below the cabin floor. Nydia, in a 
laced and ribboned nightdress, had slept, beneath, all 
night. 

“Tumble up!” shouted the voice of Blazes. “All 
hands on deck. Here’s your blessed island, bless you, 
my darlings!” He had, throughout the trip, ad¬ 
dressed his passengers in the most extraordinary terms 
of endearment—Stacy supposed as a substitute for 
stronger words forbidden by her presence and Nydia’s. 


68 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


She had barely fallen asleep; the dawn was still pink 
in the sky, the seabirds on the reefs crying and flut¬ 
tering in the face of rising day. She sat up and looked 
drowsily from the little port over her bunks. 

“Oh!” was all she said, but the tone brought Nydia, 
plump, rose-cheeked and rose-ribboned, out of her 
berth below. 

“What is it?” she asked, tiptoeing on bare feet to 
look out. Her golden hair fell in a shower below her 
waist; she took a handful of it and flung it carelessly 
forward. . . . Stacy knew, somehow, that she was 
doing it on the chance of Plummer’s passing the port. 
She had to remind herself, with set teeth, that there was 
no reason, human or divine, against Nydia’s doing just 
that thing if she liked; against her making any and 
every effort to attract the attention of a good-looking, 
manly fellow, who was vowed to no one—who was free, 
free—as she herself had been—once. 

But nobody passed the port. There was coffee being 
served on the main hatch at that moment, and the men, 
barefoot and pajama-clad, were enjoying it out of 
sight of the ladies’ cabin. A black cannibal from the 
Purari had just slammed down two tin pannikins at 
Stacy’s door. 

“It’s a nice place,” observed Nydia, critically, shar¬ 
ing the port with Stacy. 

“It’s Paradise,” said Stacy, breathing hard. She 
was torn with longing—with regret—with passionate 
revolt against the mocking Fate that torments us, all 
through life, by crushing into our willing-unwilling 
hands the very gifts we have longed for, shorn of the 
one thing that would make them perfect. 

The island was the island of a dream. 

Tombazis had run his boat into a glassy bay, held 


SHELLS AND PEARLS 


69 


lovingly in the curved arm of a long shore. Behind 
the white, white beach, behind the never-resting ripples 
that laughed and whispered on the coral sand, rose 
palms and a green hill. You could not tell, save for 
the line of ripples, where the palms and the green 
heights ended and where their reflections began, so 
bright was the still sea-mirror enfolded in the arms of 
the bay. There were dark woods behind, fairy-tale 
woods, full of mystery. There were caves, high- 
arched, in the rocks above the shore. Green garlands 
dripped from overhanging terraces; on long peninsu¬ 
las, stretched claw-like out from land, stood solitary 
palms, more beautiful than anything in the world. 
And there was no one there. And it was Mark Plum¬ 
mer’s island, his very own. And she, Stacy, stood 
there looking at it from the port of the schooner, know¬ 
ing that it might, for her and for another, be the very 
Paradise that all true lovers dream of, yet knowing 
that for her and for that other it never—never— 
would. 

They breakfasted, and went ashore. And now for 
a while youth had its way with Stacy, and she forgot 
her heaviness of heart. After all—it was adventure; 
they were following the bright star that has led so 
many of earth’s best and worst into far places. And 
this was far. Who in the course of the rolling sea¬ 
sons came to these lonely isles? Who braved the tal- 
oned reefs and treacherous seas that guarded them? 
Once in a way a fisher of beche-de-mer, it might be; 
oftener, a native in a canoe, travelling silently on some 
mysterious native business. 

No more; perhaps not even so much. This island of 
Oro—how many times had human foot landed on it and 
explored it? Once, maybe; maybe not that. The 


70 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


owner might have taken it up without landing upon it; 
such methods of land purchase are strangely common 
about Papua and its islands. If Plummer was right 
about the shell, it must have been visited a few times by 
Japanese pearl-fishers, secretly, as they themselves had 
visited it—creeping through the reefs by night, and in 
the morning finding themselves safely sheltered under 
the hills of the mirror-like bay, invisible from the outer 
seas. But was he right? Well, that was what they 
were there to prove. 

She stole a glance at him. They were walking all 
together, Stacy by her husband, Nydia between Tom- 
bazis and Plummer. The sand had been crossed; they 
were now passing underneath the transparent shade of 
a grove of coconut palms rooted in thin grasses. 
Plummer, a little ahead of the rest, was striding stead¬ 
ily with the loose yet determined gait of the practised 
foot-traveller. He seemed to be looking about him for 
something. 

“Where are we going to pitch our camp?” asked 
Nydia, in her tinkling voice. 

“That’s what I’m looking for. We don’t want to be 
too far from the sea.” 

“Why not under these lovely palms ?” 

“And get your lovely head broken every time a lovely 
nut came thundering down?” shouted Tombazis. 
Plummer did not answer directly, but kept on looking 
about. They had passed the palms and come into a 
thicket of small bushy trees. 

“We shall clear a bit,” he said. “The boys can 
knock down this light stuff in half an hour. A good 
place. Not too visible, if any one does blow into the 
bay. And if they do see our camp, why, we are only 
people who have called in for wood and water.” 


SHELLS AND PEARLS 


71 


By night-time the energy of Plummer, backed by 
Tombazis and his natives, had transformed the space 
behind the palms. Where, in the morning, a thicket of 
dense brush had stood, knitted with lianas, and starred 
with flowers white and crimson that had blown and 
fallen, blown and fallen, undisturbed, since the days of 
Columbus, by evening a lodge in the wilderness had 
arisen, standing clear upon grass and sand; fashioned 
all of green coconut leaves cunningly woven into stiff 
basket panels and supported on uprights and cross¬ 
pieces of saplings. The roof, for this night only, was 
of tarpaulin; next night, Tombazis promised, his boys 
should have a good grass thatch put up. A partition 
had been made in the middle of the house, and there 
were two doors, so that the women could go in and out 
undisturbed. Rough but comfortable beds, of sack¬ 
ing swung on poles, had been set up; mosquito-nets 
were fastened to slender uprights. A hurricane lamp 
in the middle of the roof tree lighted both rooms alike. 
When dark came down, food was served on a packing- 
case table placed in the men’s rooms, with logs for 
chairs. In the wide doorway, as they sat and ate, a 
great space of stars rose clear and sparkling wonder¬ 
fully ; the trunks of the coco palms showed palely under 
a cloud of leaves. They could hear the feet of the lit¬ 
tle waves running on the verge of the lagoon. They 
could feel that beyond was silence, and great seas, and 
loneliness; beyond that, still more seas, more solitude; 
far, far away, the world . 

In the coconut house that night three people did 
not sleep, and two—Nydia and Tombazis—slept well. 
The snore of Tombazis, a trumpet of power, advertised 
to Oro Island and the Coral Sea that the captain of 
the Kikenni rested. The dead silence in Nydia’s cor- 


72 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


ner told that the lady of the golden hair slept deep. 
Holliday tossed and groaned, half waking; it seemed 
that his misfortunes pressed heavily on his mind. 
Stacy lay still, and slept scarce at all; each time she 
moved, restlessly, on her creaking bed, she could hear 
a slight movement from the far corner of the house 
where she knew that Plummer camped. At last, in the 
late still hours, tired Nature had her way, and Stacy’s 
eyes closed fast. 

She slept heavily at first; then dreams crept into the 
depths of her sleep, and troubled it. She was steering 
the Kikenni through dangerous seas; she did not know 
the coast; she trembled, lest she should run the ship on 
some hidden reef. And there was nobody to help her; 
the decks were deserted. She cried for help—still no 
one came, and the waves grew wild about the ship; 
spray struck like stones on the deckhouse; the bul¬ 
warks reeled against a darkening sky. “Oh, somebody 
help me!” she called again, in the soundless cry of 
dreams. This time she knew that she would be an¬ 
swered; she let the wheel slip from her stiffened hands, 
and reached out through the darkness. ... A 
hand seized hers. 

Suddenly, completely, she woke, her heart leaping 
like a captured fish. The hand was real. 

Even as she woke, it let go. But she knew it had 
been there. The touch of warm living fingers on her 
own still lingered, and more, there was the sensation— 
indescribable, yet not to be mistaken—of another 
presence in the little room. 

Stacy was no coward; she snatched, without a mo¬ 
ment’s hesitation, at the little electric torch that lay 
by her bed, and snapped it on. The light shone on 
green woven walls and tarpaulin roof; on Nydia’s 


SHELLS AND PEARLS 73 

suit-case lying by Nydia’s bed; on Nydia herself, com¬ 
pletely and unbecomingly asleep. Nothing more. 

It seemed impossible that any living thing could 
have touched her and got out of the room in the brief 
instant required for lighting the torch—got away, 
moreover, without the slightest sound. Stacy felt 
wildly certain that some one had been there, yet her 
reason compelled her to believe that she was wrong. 

“It must have been a dream,” she thought. “It 
could not have been anything else.” 

All the same, she rose, clad as she was in pajamas 
and light wrapper, and slipped soundlessly, the torch 
in her hand, to the door of the men’s room. She 
looked at her husband. He was quite certainly 
asleep. 

“Then it was not . . .” she thought. Tombazis, 

still trumpeting like an elephant, lay motionless in his 
bunk. She turned the torch to the far end of the room. 
Plummer’s face, awake and brilliant-eyed, showed in 
the little circle of the light. 

“Anything wrong?” he asked her, in a half-whisper. 

“I thought there was some one about,” she an¬ 
swered, uncertainly. 

Plummer rose without a word and went, a lean, mus¬ 
cular, barefooted figure, blue-clad, over to Holliday’s 
bed. 

“Here, I want you,” he said. 

Holliday, blinking in the light of the torch, woke 
up, stared, and slipped to his feet. He had been too 
long in Papua to argue about an alarm in the middle 
of the night, reasonable or unreasonable. 

“Mrs. Holliday thinks she heard something,” ex¬ 
plained Plummer. Stacy, about to correct him, held 
back. After all, was there anything in it? 


74 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Another torch was lit, and the two men walked round 
the house. Nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard. 

“There, I told you,” grumbled Holliday, who had 
not told any one anything. “Women’s nonsense. I knew 
you’d go on like this, squeaking at a shadow, if you and 
Miss Leven were together. Hang it, single girls ought¬ 
n’t to come on a trip like this, messing things up. You 
ought both of you to have some one to look out for 
you, and keep you from getting hysterics.” 

Nydia, who had awakened by this time, was heard 
getting up. She had time to throw a becoming and 
unsuitable blue silk kimono about her and to let loose 
her thick plait of hair before she came to the doorway. 
A vision of blue and gold, she stood in the light of the 
torches. Stacy’s heart grew suddenly hot; small 
feminine jealousies, such as she had never known be¬ 
fore, assailed her. She could not tell how rare, how 
sweet she looked herself, in her robe of white crepe, 
dark-twisted hair glooming above dark-shadowed eyes, 
bitter-sweetness of unhappy love lending to her small 
ivory face a significance, a poetry that Nydia’s bar¬ 
maid beauty could never know. She only saw that 
Nydia, at Holliday’s free speech, turned shyly, coyly 
toward Mark Plummer, and looked, half laughing, 
through her veil of marvellous hair. 

Mark met her look as any man would have met it — 
with just the warm glance she expected as her due. 
Stacy knew there was no special meaning in the look, 
but she felt her breath grow short and her cheeks burn. 
She turned, by some uncomprehended impulse, to Holli¬ 
day. 

“Don’t worry, Charlie,” she said kindly. “I should¬ 
n’t have waked you. I daresay it was nothing at all. 
Good-night.” 


SHELLS AND PEARLS 


75 


“Good-night,” echoed Holliday, kissing her with a 
sounding smack, and whispering in her ear, as he let 
her go, “Damn Nydia.” 

But Stacy, in spite of Nydia’s locks and looks, was 
very far from wishing her damned that trip. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


HE first thing to do to-day,” said Plummer, “is 
to go all over the island.” 



They had finished breakfast; the sun was a 
little way up the sky. Before them stretched a day that 
held no claims save those that they themselves might 
make. Duties, engagements, responsibilities, lay many 
and many a long sea-mile away. The freedom of the 
wilderness—that strong food, craved by most men, the 
nourishment of some, the poison of others—was theirs 
for the taking. And that day it savoured good. 

Holliday, in whose veins ran the narcotized blood of 
a family too old and too much inbred, stood stretch¬ 
ing himself, and yawning in the early sun. “This suits 
me,” he said, through gaping jaws. “Why don’t we 
all live on desert islands? No worry.” His face, 
stamped with a vague refinement and a vaguer weak¬ 
ness, looked, underneath his wide pith helmet, like the 
faces of the club-men in Cheney’s whisky advertise¬ 
ments. He stared vaguely, and did not notice that 
Stacy was standing near him. Unless he was feeling 
affectionate, he never did seem to notice her existence. 

Stacy, a little pale from want of sleep—for that in¬ 
cident of the grasping hand, real or unreal, had spoiled 
her night—was running large hatpins through a shad¬ 
ing hat. She had dressed herself in sporting clothes of 


76 


THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


77 


khaki; the trjung colour suited to perfection her deli¬ 
cate, shell-white skin. The prettiest foot in Oceania 
showed its arch in laced brown boots beneath her brief 
full skirts. Nydia Leven displayed the trace of He¬ 
brew that some suspected in her ancestry in the bril¬ 
liance of her gold silk blouse, the costly shimmer of her 
thin cloth skirt. She had ugly sand shoes on. “Who¬ 
ever marries you,” thought Mark Plummer, looking at 
her underneath his heavy eyelids, “will see you in curl 
papers at breakfast.” For, living much away from 
human kind, he was curiously innocent in some small 
ways, and did not know that the curl paper was dead as 
Queen Victoria. 

“You needn’t if you don’t choose. We want some¬ 
body to stop in camp,” was his reply to Holliday. 
“Blazes, you and I will have a tramp over the ground, 
and the ladies can come if they like.” 

Tomhazis turned his big brown eyes, pathetic as a 
seal’s, to Nydia. “You’ll come?” he said. 

Nydia, who considered him enormously beneath her 
(her father had been a small provincial attorney), 
smiled, with one hand threading back a tress of gold. 

“Of course,” she said. It seemed to her that one 
might find it amusing to enslave this Caliban. 

Nevertheless, she was displeased when Stacy and 
Mark started off together, walking side by side with 
the swing of old companions. She promised herself 
she would set things even by and by. 

Mark led them along the beach. “It isn’t a big is¬ 
land,” he said. “We can walk round it before lunch 
time if we stick to the shore.” His face was as blank 
as an Egyptian image, but in his heart he was experi¬ 
encing strange discoveries, new delights. Plummer 
had led a man’s life, neither more nor less; yet never, 


78 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


in any love adventure, had he found the feeling of per¬ 
fect comradeship, the sensation of coming home, given 
him by the sight of that slim khaki figure tramping 
along beside him. “My woman, some day, somehow or 
other. And damn that husband of hers,” he thought, 
as he strode along. He did not formulate plans, or 
dream dreams, womanwise; he only felt that things 
would—must—come round for him. Things, somehow, 
always had. 

But Stacy, walking beside him, felt herself step, at 
every foot of the way, upon sharp knives. “You, 
you,” the bells of her heart were tolling, where they 
should have rung in silver carillons. “You—whom I 
tired waiting for; you who were in the world all the 
time. You—too late!” It was strange, how the very 
soles of her boots seemed to know about it; they beat 
heavily upon the sand—one, two, one, two—and the 
steps of that long walk, as mile after mile it unrolled, 
hurt something in her mind. They should have been 
such light, such eager steps, in such companionship. 
Walking on knives . . . the old fables slipped 

back into her mind. How horribly true were all the 
similes that had to do with human pain! 

Plummer, being like most Australians an entirely 
masculine man, did not find his mind altogether taken 
up with such subtleties. Largely, in the foreground, 
loomed the quest he had undertaken in coming to Oro 
Island. He was, even as he talked to Stacy, turning 
over things in his mind, and making out the best places 
to begin his search. 

“It shouldn’t be within sight of the anchorage,” he 
said, suddenly, in the silence that followed on a curious 
tale he had been telling of the cannibal inland towns. 

Stacy understood at once. 


THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


79 


“No,” she agreed. “Ships might come up and see 
him putting it away.” 

“Blazes,” called out Plummer, turning around, “what 
was the last price of shell in T. I. ?” 

“Two hundred and forty-five a ton,” answered Tom- 
bazis. 

“The old beggar and his mates have been stowing it 
away for ten years. Shell keeps, and the chances of 
getting it away wouldn’t be many,” pronounced Plum¬ 
mer. “I’ll call a halt now, and we can have a look 
round.” 

They came to a pause in a wonderful painted bay. 
Foreground, middle distance, and distance alike were 
very palettes of colour. The low cliffs circling the bay 
blazed with verdigris-coloured bush. Small islets, col¬ 
oured like the feathers in purple, green, and blue bush 
parrots, lay floating on the level glass of the lagoon. 
Some distance out reef water began, and there the 
sea was spread in lakes of milky jade and clouded 
malachite, of heliotrope as clear as flowers, of 
heather-pink, pearl-colour, scilla-blue. Farther, came 
pure, deep sapphire, leaning on the thin trans¬ 
parent blues and marbled clouds of a southeast 
season sky. 

The four adventurers stood silent. Nydia was first 
to speak. 

“I feel as if we oughtn’t to be here,” she said. 

“I know,” agreed Stacy, staring at the insolent 
splendours of the bay. “It doesn’t want us.” 

Tombazis, with the sailor’s calm disregard of scen¬ 
ery, stood re-tying the tassels of his crimson sash and 
visibly peacocking over the effect he felt he must be 
making against all that blue. 

Plummer, who did not sing, but whistled like any 


80 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


bird, seemed to be looking at, and thinking of, nobody, 
as he fluted, through half-closed lips, the air of— 

Scenes that are brightest 
May charm awhile 
Hearts that are lightest, 

And lips that smile. 

But although above us 
All Nature beam. 

With no one to love us. 

How sad they seem! 

Stacy felt that she had borne as much, just then, as 
she was able to bear. 

“What about the shell?” she burst in. 

Plummer went on whistling. 

“Oh—the shell!” he said, breaking off. “This bay 
is the likeliest place on the island! No ship would 
come nearer those reefs than she could help, and-” 

“You’re right, by the Cape of Good Hope!” burst 
in Tombazis, with one of his new, Bowdlerized oaths he 
seemed to have been cultivating. “Bless your beauti¬ 
ful eyes, those reefs go out, on the water, and under the 
water, for a matter of five miles. If you had had any 
other d-delightful captain to take you through them, 
the spider crabs would have been eating out Mrs. Hol¬ 
liday’s and Miss Leven’s nice little pink tongues just 
at this very beautiful minute.” 

“So much the better,” commented Plummer, coolly, 
to the first part of Blazes’s speech. Stacy noticed 
that he did not seem at all moved by the picture of her 
tongue being eaten out. A man who had struck up 
against so many hard realities, she reflected, was not 
likely to be affected by fanciful pictures. 

“Of course,” went on Plummer, “the T. I. luggers 



THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


81 


could get through somehow if they knew the ground. 
But I reckon they don’t. There never was any shell 
up here.” 

“There’s beche-de-mer,” put in Blazes, looking at the 
sea-slugs strewn in the shallow water. 

“Not much of the best, I should say. They’ll go to 
the neighbourhood of Warrior Reef for that. No, 
this is a desert island all right, if any such thing does 
exist nowadays. A good one—out of the course of 
everywhere, and not too far away. I reckon, if I had 
been bent on shell stealing, I’d have picked it first go.” 

“If you found the shell, wouldn’t it belong to Wy- 
vern Brothers?” asked Stacy, putting the problem that 
had been perplexing her all along. 

“Not necessarily. There’s been stealing from every 
firm on T. I.” 

“Oh!” was all she found to say in answer. She was 
sure that Plummer had reserved something. 

It would be like him to do so. His candour had been 
altogether unnatural up to this—if she had judged 
his character rightly. 

“I wonder if we’ve got any d— any darling rivals?” 
suggested Tombazis, who had finished with his sash 
and was standing in a leading-baritone attitude, legs 
aslant and hand on hip, twisting his moustache at 
Nydia. 

Upon this, Stacy was suddenly moved to speak. 

“I thought something touched me last night,” she 
said. 

Plummer’s head was round at once. 

“Touched you? You never said that!” he exclaimed. 

“I thought I might be mistaken.” 

“How did it touch you?” 

“I thought a hand came and touched mine.” 


82 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“On which side?” 

“I don’t—oh, it must have been the left side, because 
I felt my ring when I pulled it away.” 

“You were sleeping with your left side to the outer 
wall of the hut?” asked Plummer. 

“Yes.” 

He became thoughtful for a minute, and then re¬ 
marked: “We’ll go on round this bay and have a good 
look at any place where you could bring in shell and 
hide it.” 

“What do you think about the hand?” demanded 
Nydia, with a sidewise glance. But Plummer did not 
seem to hear her. 

They marched on round the bay. The sun was high 
and very hot now; the intense whiteness of the sand 
struck like a blow. Cuttlefish bones, burned pure as 
snow, crunched under their feet as they went. Green 
and blue “peacock eyes,” washed out from reef shells, 
stared at them in the sand. The tide, coming in, rat¬ 
tled among the exquisite loose corals with which the 
beach was strewn. 

“Pity,” said Tombazis, “there isn’t any decent mar¬ 
ket for these d-delightful cuttle bones. I never re¬ 
member seeing such a lot about anywhere.” 

“I reckon they come from Warrior Reef,” replied 
Plummer, tramping heavily. The sand here was deep 
and soft; Stacy began to lag a little behind. He did not 
slacken his pace, but casually slipped one hand beneath 
her elbow and lifted her on. Stacy felt as though half 
her bodily weight had been suddenly removed. 

“He is strong,” she felt, proudly. 

Tombazis, lighting, as he went, an immense and 
spectacular cigar, shook his head to intimate he had 
something else to say when he was ready. Presently, 


THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


83 


after a puff, he twisted the cigar into one corner of 
his mouth. “I don’t think it’s that,” he said. 

“What, then?” 

“Likely these reefs are jam full up with the lovely 
things. Miss Leven, you had better be careful how 
you go out looking for corals. Take a boy with you, 
my delightful young lady, in case you might get into 
holes with the jammy things. They’d drown you as 
soon as look at you.” 

“I shall take you,” was Nydia’s comment, accom¬ 
panied by a flirt of her short skirts. The face of 
Blazes lighted up. 

“And indeed you will,” he replied, with a sudden out¬ 
burst of the Irish accent that occasionally reminded 
folk of the fact that “Knives and Dynamite” owned an 
Irish mother. “Faith you will, Miss Nydia, if you like 
it. You will take me to Warrior Reef, or to hell, if 
it pleases you.” 

Nydia’s greedy vanity basked in the homage; never¬ 
theless, she did not miss the fact that Stacy, supported 
by Mark’s powerful arm, had got a long way ahead of 
her. 

“Let’s hurry,” she said. “They might find some¬ 
thing without us.” 

“No fear. If we run across anything in the next 
ten days, Miss Nydia, we’ll be a jammy lucky lot of 
beautiful people.” 

“Let’s hurry,” was Nydia’s only reply. “Consider¬ 
ing,” she thought to herself, “that I gave a hundred 
pounds to help in financing the trip, I think he might 
pay me just a little more attention.” 

They caught up Plummer and Stacy, who had 
stopped at the end of the bay. 

“Beyond this,” Plummer was saying, “you come into 


84 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


sight of the anchorage and the camp again. You see, 
it isn’t much of an island, about five miles round at the 
most.” 

“And how do you think we ought to look?” 

“I don’t think—yet. I mean to wander about all 
over the place, and let it sink into me. Time enough 
to begin thinking then.” 

“Is there really a big cache, do you think?” asked 
Nydia, with sharp interest. 

“The old Jap who took up the place was the biggest 
thief on T. I.” 

“What would it be worth? At a rough guess?” 

“He might have had a hundred tons stowed away for 
what I know.” 

“At two hundred and twenty-five! Why, even at 
two hundred, it would be twenty thousand pounds!” 

“Yes,” said the miner calmly. To him, as to nearly 
all men who have taken gold from the earth with their 
own hands, money was no object of worship. 

But it was different with Nydia. The remote He¬ 
brew strain in her awakened. She looked at Plummer 
with more respect than she had yet shown. Not before 
had she been closely acquainted with the man who 
draws his living from one natural treasure or another 
of earth’s lands and seas. Not before had she under¬ 
stood, as she swiftly understood now, that inability to 
keep, rather than inability to find, was accountable for 
the comparative poverty of these wilderness tamers. 

“A clever, saving wife,” ran her thoughts. “That’s 
what they want. . . . Twenty thousand pounds 

—no, twenty-two thousand five hundred! I do remem¬ 
ber that the Mission people told me how miners had 
come through their place with thousands of pounds’ 
worth of gold tied up in bits of old moleskin trousers, 


THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


85 


and how they wouldn’t have a bit of it left in three 
months’ time. ... If I’d the looking after 

it. . . 

Her thoughts ran off in a day dream as golden as her 
hair. Miss Leven was no heiress, though she had been 
able to produce a hundred pounds for the expedition 
funds. She had a few—a very few—hundreds a year, 
of which she made the most possible in the way of show. 
But she was longing—had been longing for years—to 
fasten safely to her chariot-wheels a maker of sums 
more considerable. Nydia had “had chances”—there 
were several men in Melbourne, in the set of her par¬ 
ents, quite willing to pay for her clothes and jewels to 
the end of her life. Unluckily, she was handicapped 
by the fact that she was exclusively admired by elderly 
and effeminate men, added to the fact that she passion¬ 
ately admired the type known as primitive. It is not 
scarce in Australia, but it had not admired, never 
would admire, Nydia Leven. 

The man of the wilderness, most manly of all the men 
who live, loves the warm heart; and Nydia, though 
sensuous, was cold. Her golden hair, her pretty- 
woman ways, attracted old men of business, fat middle- 
aged Hebrews in the theatrical trade. . . . Hard 

riders from the bushlands, young station owners with 
outlooking eyes, looked past her without seeing. 

She had accepted, first, the invitation of a mission¬ 
ary friend; later, the carelessly given come-and-stay- 
some-time of Stacy Holliday, with the full intention of 
finding, in this country of adventure, the kind of man 
she wanted. She considered that she had found him, 
and here, in the stark loneliness of the bush, with no 
one to interfere (for what was a married woman, es¬ 
pecially a “pi” like Stacy?) she meant to secure him. 


86 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


As Plummer had promised, they were back at the 
camp by lunch. During the hot hours of early after¬ 
noon the laziness of tropic lands seemed to take pos¬ 
session of almost every one. It was amazingly warm; 
the leathernecks in the tall beach palms ceased, for a 
while, their curious human cries—“Do it now!” 
“Thirty years too slow!” “You’ll eat your soap! 
You’ll eat your soap! You’ll eat!”—and settled down 
to silence. Tall kuru-kuru grasses kept up a sleepy 
rustling in the slackened wind; the sea, on the burning 
beach, drew faintly back and forth. A feeling of far- 
awayness, of loosening, complete and swift, from all the 
bonds and burdens of the outer world, seemed to inform 
the very air, like some intoxicating, murmurous song. 
They who have gone to the world’s end will understand. 

The two young women, tired with their walk, lay 
half-dreaming under the shadow of the thatched ve¬ 
randa that Tombazis’s boys, as promised, had woven in 
the course of the morning. Tombazis, a mighty bulk, 
was stretched out snoring, on his bed. Holliday, who 
had the vice of reading—he could no more pass an un¬ 
conscious hour without some sort of print than a 
drunkard can pass an hour without a drink—had made 
himself a cool couch in a hammock and was lazily drug¬ 
ging his brain with detective yarns. Plummer alone 
was out. His wiry frame craved no siesta; he read 
only when he had something that appeared to him 
worth reading. He was away,' under the searing sun, 
tramping the island over and over again. The morn¬ 
ing’s walk had not been, to him, business; he had not 
intended it as such. It was a pleasure trip, pure and 
simple. Now that real work was afoot, he did not 
want the women—not even Stacy. 

What he was looking for was known to himself alone. 


THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


87 


With a long stick in his hand and a bush knife stuck 
in his belt, he skirted the coral reef, now spread out 
glittering and bare by the retreating of the afternoon 
tide. He peered into long cracks, where ugly-faced 
great eels bit and worried the point of his investigating 
stick. He stood, with a foot behind him ready to jump 
back, on the edges of certain ponds and cisterns in the 
reef, that were full of live bright corals, green, pink, 
and purple tipped. Once or twice he broke a chunk 
of the heavy brainstone coral, and threw it in, watch¬ 
ing closely afterward. As the tide went down, he 
walked farther out, until he stood on the very end of 
the reef, where the shallow coral-blossomed waters sud¬ 
denly came to an end and all in one step dropped into 
seas black-blue. From this he turned back, and car¬ 
ried his search into the long fingers of deep water that 
here and there invaded the shallow reef. One place, 
of three or four fathoms, seemed to interest him; you 
could see the bottom here, a long way down, and the 
reefs, like low cliffs of beaten silver, that surrounded 
it. While he looked, softly as a gliding shadow came 
in from outer seas something long, dark, hideously 
active and elastic; something with a scythe-shaped tail 
and a strange, ugly head like a double hammer. It 
looked at him with huge black and white eyes that 
clearly understood, and, as silently as it had come, dis¬ 
appeared—no one might say where or how. 

“Hammerhead shark. Nice customer,” was Plum¬ 
mer’s wordless comment as he retraced his way. 

The dreamers were still dreaming when he reached 
camp again. It was like the Palace of the Sleeping 
Beauty. Nydia and Stacy were fast asleep now; Hol¬ 
liday had nodded and nodded over “Seymour the 
Sleuth,” until his head fell down on the book; the trum- 


88 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


pet of Tombazis sounded loudly from within. Plum¬ 
mer cast a look round, and stepped into the house. He 
said nothing, made no sound, but shortly the snore of 
Tombazis slackened and broke off. In another min¬ 
ute the big man came out of the house, beside Mark 
Plummer, both walking quietly. 

When they were a little way from the camp, Plum¬ 
mer stopped. “Blazes,” he said, “I don’t like what 
Mrs. Holliday said last night.” 

“My delightful man, I didn’t like it either,” was Tom- 
bazis’s reply. 

“Holliday may think it was fancy if he likes. I 
reckon you and I know better. We’d as well go and 
have a look, now every one’s asleep. Come back and do 
a bit of tracking, and then we’ll get away and talk it 
over. That Nydia’s as artful as a basket of snakes. 
No knowing if she’s asleep or not.” 

“Isn’t she artful?” agreed Tombazis, admiringly. 
“Hell’s gates, but I could love that woman! Do you 
mind ?” 

“Mind ?” cried Plummer, explosively. “Why the 
deuce should I mind, if you and all the men in the world 
loved her till the last trumpet blew ?” 

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Tombazis, soothingly, bit¬ 
ing off the end of a cigar. “And it doesn’t matter 
much anyhow, does it, my delightful chap?” 

“No,” agreed Plummer, “it doesn’t.” 

“Not when men—men like you and me, my beautiful, 
blessed friend—make up their delightful minds. Eh?” 

Plummer seemed to understand what was meant. 
He reached into the sailor’s pocket, helped himself to 
a cigar, and, feeling for his matches, remarked: 

“The people who bought you for a fool, Blazes, 
would find themselves out in their bargain.” 


THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


89 


“Yes, I’m da— I’m delightfully clever,” agreed 
Blazes simply. “What about the black-tracker stuff?” 

They went back, quietly, to the house, and examined 
from the outside the wall of woven palm leaf against 
which Stacy’s bed had been placed. 

Tombazis’s quick, light fingers went at once to a spot 
where one leaf seemed to bend a little inward. He drew 
them out and pointed silently. 

Plummer looked, but made no remark. Both men 
saw clearly that the leaf had been cut with a sharp 
knife. Bending over the ground they worked together, 
silently, for a minute or two. Plummer touched Tom¬ 
bazis’s elbow, and pointed to a scarcely visible depres¬ 
sion in a patch of sand. Together they noted a severed 
stem of pawpaw cut in an odd, jagged way, al¬ 
most as if some animal had bitten it. One saw a small 
glittering thread, and picked it up. The other, 
crouching down and measuring with his arm, seemed to 
be making a calculation of some kind. 

They rose, and slipped away. On the other side of 
the house, Holliday waked up, and opened his detective 
novel again. It was an interesting yarn. 

Out in the open glare of the beach, Tombazis let 
loose his tongue. 

“Pretty clear. Pretty dashed clear, that. Eh?” 
He threw out one palm inquiringly. 

Plummer nodded. 

“We’ll put on guards,” he said, after a moment’s 
whistling. “Perfectly absurd, this is. Might as well 
be up the Fly River at once. You’d have thought, out 
among these islands-” 

“My delightful man,” remarked Tombazis, “you 
know as well as I do that it’s no use thinking in Papua. 
You can only take things as they come along.” 



90 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“Right,” agreed Plummer. Neither of the two was 
especially moved by the discovery that had been made, 
though it seemed likely to involve the safety of the 
whole party. Papua had burned out of them all ca¬ 
pacity for worry. 

There was a moment’s silence. The two men stood 
looking out to sea. A gigantic silver-coloured fish in 
the lagoon leaped suddenly, and fell with a sound like 
a gunshot. The wind was getting up again; it ruffled 
in the thin palms above their heads. 

“Let’s have a game of euchre before tea,” proposed 
Plummer. 

Blazes, delving deep into his pockets, produced a 
pack of cards, gaudy, new, and clean. 

“There’s a packing case that will make a good 
table,” observed Mark. “I’ll take the middle watch,” 
he added irrelevantly. 

“My darling, blessed chap, that you won’t,” was 
Blazes’s answer. “For I will have that watch myself.” 

“I’m taking it, I say.” 

“We’ll play for it,” offered Blazes, brilliantly. 

“Right,” agreed Plummer. “There’s no use looking 
over the island any more.” 

“No. Next island’s the one.” 

“What about making a raid?” 

“If you were certain—but you can’t be, my delight¬ 
ful chap. Might not be that island after all. And 
then where are you with Oro, left alone for them to 
play their little games?” 

“Of course,” said Plummer, thoughtfully, “it’s clear 
what the games are.” 

“Yes. Great minds like yours, my darling man, 
don’t run all alone. They run in pairs, mostly. Al¬ 
ways some one crabbing your great ideas as soon as 


THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


91 


you’ve worked ’em out, maybe sooner. By the way, 
Plummer, where do you really think the stuff may be?” 

“If you think of the number of bones we saw on the 
beach,” answered Mark, “an idea may penetrate by 
degrees into your thick skull.” 

“Ah!” commented Blazes. “An excellent notion, 
too. A beautiful damned notion. Whoever thought 
of it! But, my delightful person, it seems to me to 
want proof.” 

“Look here. You’ve been in Samarai?” 

“A few hundred times.” 

“You know what there is in the strait between Gesila 
Island and the mainland? Well, the old Jap used to 
work there.” 

“Not enough, my dear friend,” was the only comment 
offered by the acute Greek-Irishman. “Very, very 
good, but not enough.” 

Plummer cursed him a little, in an agreeable, friendly 
manner. “Well, seeing we’re the only two men in this 
outfit,” he said, “I suppose you’ve got to have it.” He 
reached into a trousers pocket, and pulled something 
out. It was a small pearl shell with a rude sketch of 
a fish on it and the bearings of an island—Oro. 

“You got that from the man who sold you the 
place?” asked Tombazis, handling the shell. 

“Yes. He saw nothing in it.” 

“My delightful chap,” observed Tombazis, dreamily, 
turning the shell over and over in his hands, “are you 
sure, desperate sure, that no one else did?” 

“I’m not sure at all.” 

“Well, neither am I. What do these dots mean, 
after the sketch of the beautiful fish?” 

There was a sparkle in Plummer’s eyes—a sparkle 
that had been there before, when his hands were clutch- 


92 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


ing the edge of a miner’s wash-up dish, and yellow 
specks were beginning to show on the shaken bottom. 

“So you can’t see that?” he laughed. “Old son, 
you’re not as sharp as you think yourself.” 

Blazes, holding the shell, made no move to turn 
round and look about the landscape. Instead, he 
looked into Plummer’s face, and followed his eyes. 

“Ahm!” he said, turning suddenly, and swinging a 
dramatic finger. “I see.” He pointed out across the 
low-tide shore. “But, my darling man, where did the 
bubbly Jap begin from?” 

“That’s what he didn’t tell us. You must remem¬ 
ber he died, and another Jap got this, and took up the 
island. The other fellow—he went off by an N. Y. K. 
boat just after, as soon as he’d bitten my ear for the 
fare—evidently saw nothing in it. It wouldn’t have 
been more than guess, as far as I’m concerned, either, 
only that, when I was down in T. I. just after, I heard 
some of the shelling people cursing the old Jap—the 
dead one—up and down, and inside out, for having got 
away with so much shell. My Jap was one of the 
Papuan lot—a fellow who got into the country ages 
ago, before the exclusion laws—so he knew nothing 
much about Thursday Island. How he got hold of the 
other Jap’s effects is a thing I’ve never heard, and 
don’t care about anyway. You never know those yel¬ 
low men all through.” 

“And of course,” concluded Blazes, lighting his 
eternal cigar, “you let it alone because you were off to 
the gold rush. And you missed the chance of getting in 
early, because you stepped behind to look out for-” 

“What about our game of cards?” interrupted Plum¬ 
mer. 

“We’ll have it after tea. Plummer”—-he had aban- 



THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


93 


doned his careless way of speaking, and lifted a serious 
eye above the cigar he was lighting—“Plummer, you 
weren’t the only one who heard the talk on—T. I.” 

“No,” agreed Mark, picking up the allusion without 
difficulty. “The sort of people who cut things with 
wavy knives-” 

“And have threads of bullion in their beautiful 
sashes-” 

“And who run across in praus from Dutch New 
Guinea to places where they’ve no legal right to be 

_J5 

“Damn the Dutch Government,” said Blazes, fall¬ 
ing back into his old vernacular. “And damn their 
pet, etcetera-adjectived Malays. We’re too close to 
them by half.” 

The two men had found a seat by now, a fallen palm 
log shaded by a rock. Mark pulled out and lit his 
pipe. They had an air, thus seated and smoking to¬ 
gether, of being what indeed they were—the only two 
people who mattered on the island. They had also 
an air of knowing it. 

“It will be that island—what do you call it?” 

“Nothing,” answered Blazes. “Got no name.” 

“About fifteen miles to the northwest of us!” 

Tombazis bowed his head, as the lordly tenor in an 
opera bows it, when engaged, temporarily, in “feeding” 
the speech of some one else. 

“Last night one of them was here spying round.” 

Blazes puffed calmly at his cigar. 

“He made his report to the rest, and to-night, if we 
didn’t keep a watch, they’d be up along in the dark of 
the moon, and cut the guts out of every one.” 

“Oh, no, my lovely friend,” corrected Blazes, smok¬ 
ing slowly. “Not every one of us, three of us only.” 





THE SANDS OF ORO 


94 


Plummer’s face grew dark with suddenly rising blood. 
“Yes,” he said. “Well,” after a pause, “I said I’d 
play you for the middle watch, and I will, but if you 
weren’t as good a man as I am, I’d see you drowned 
first.” 

“Yes, my darling fellow, but I am as good a man. 
When it comes to cutting guts out of people, I am even 
better, maybe,” commented Blazes. 

“We’ve all our own ways of fighting, Blazes,” said 
Plummer very amiably. “A good Colt forty-five is as 
good a thing as there is, for me.” 

“A man’s own weapon—and a man’s own tobacco. 
Nothing to beat either,” observed Tombazis. 

“Except a man’s own girl.” 

“Ah!” sighed the Irish-Greek, with an air of happy 
recollection. He seemed to be lost for a moment. 
Then, coming back—“But I think we’re delightful well 
off on this island of yours, eh? With good smokes, 
and good whisky, and a good fight, maybe, and two de¬ 
lightful, lovely girls. Eh?” 

Plummer was pressing down the tobacco in his pipe. 
He remarked, by and by : 

“What about Holliday for to-night? I was think¬ 
ing of putting him in the morning watch.” 

“Very sensible. Any row there is will be over by 
then, or-” 

“There won’t be any ‘or’-” 

“Right! Any row there is will be over. But—see 
—why put him in the safest place? Eh?” He cocked 
his eye knowingly. 

“You don’t understand everything in the world, old 
Blazes,” answered Plummer, patiently. “This lady’s 
name isn’t Bathsheba, and mine isn’t David.” 

“No, your name is Mark,” said Tombazis, puzzled. 




THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 95 

“And a jammy ugly name for a handsome man, too. 
You’re near as good-looking as I am, Plummer.” 

“Near!” said Plummer, peacefully, sucking his pipe. 

Tombazis heaved his big bulk and flat red face with 
the raising eyes up toward the setting sun. “I’ll go 
and hoof my boys out to make tea,” he said. 

Plummer, alone, sat on and finished his pipe. By 
and by he got up, knocking out the ashes on the palm 
trunk as he rose. “I wonder what about next night ?” 
ran his thoughts. “I wonder will they allow you a 
pipe in heaven, or the other place? Well, I could do 
without that, or anything else you might like to men¬ 
tion. For if there’s any bad trouble, and some of us 
go under, why, Stacy will go under, too ; I’ll see to that. 
Stacy, my quiet little married woman, little do you 
dream of the mad unchaperoned excursion you may be 
making through the stars in Mark Plummer’s company, 
somewhere about this time to-morrow.” 

A fool is not always a coward, even as a bully is not. 
When Holliday, in a quiet moment after tea, was taken 
aside by Plummer, and told of the trouble that threat¬ 
ened, he took it very coolly. 

“Hanged if I didn’t think it was her nonsense,” he 
commented. “So there really was some one about?” 

“Blazes and I saw his footmarks, and a pawpaw 
that had been cut out of the way with a Malay kris. 
And there was a bit of that silver cord—real silver— 
they wear in some places. Anyhow, I was sure there 
had been some one about, as soon as she mentioned 
having felt a hand. You see, the spy wasn’t sure 
whether it was a man or a woman sleeping there, and 
he reached in to touch her, and got her hand. He must 
have guessed by the size and feel of it quick enough, or 


96 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


he’d have put his knife through the bed. Then she 
got up, so the beggar crawled back to his boat. But 
to-night-” 

“You think some of them will come?” 

“Yes. Whatever’s here, they probably know more 
about it than I do. They may be prepared to go to 
any length to get it. You must remember we are right 
up toward the Dutch boundary, and Dutch New Guinea 
isn’t administered as ours is. It’s full of Malays of 
one kind and another, and it’s as lawless as it can 
stick.” 

Holliday sat for a moment with his hands hanging 
between his knees, looking down at the moonlit grass. 
They were sitting out of doors, near the house; Tom- 
bazis was away at the schooner, the women had gone 
in to “tidy.” The night was full of moonlight and of 
wind; short, broken seas came spitting into the bay. 
There was a mossy, fishy smell of coral reef on the air; 
a whiff of something like fresh nutmegs from the bush; 
close at hand, the sharp, cool scent of leaves, bruised 
and thrown down on the ground. 

“I wish I was somewhere where there was a pier and 
a band,” was Holliday’s remark at last. “I hate 
these God-forsaken countries. Anyhow, they’re not 
fit for a woman.” 

The two faces in the moonlight looked at each 
other. Plummer’s clear-cut as a coin, with the pro¬ 
jecting chin and thinnish mouth that bespeaks self- 
mastery. Holliday’s the blurred stamp of a mould 
that had once been good, but that the constant usage 
of centuries seemed to have nearly worn out. Not for 
the first time the man of the wilderness found himself 
wondering how it was that the refining influences of 
long descent had worked so differently in Holliday’s 



THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


97 


case and in Stacy’s. One was fire and dew, a rare 
creature with all that was coarse, all that was super¬ 
fluous, eliminated through centuries of fine and noble 
living. The other was a good-looking, weak-looking 
creature, whose forefathers seemed, generation by gene¬ 
ration, each to have lost in idleness one more of the 
manly qualities that had been theirs in the fighting Mid¬ 
dle Ages. 

“I reckon,” thought the man whose forbears had 
been clearers of the wilderness and drivers of the 
plough, “that Stacy’s father was one of the can’t-help- 
it’s, too. That’s the sort that England sends us out; 
they keep the best, or chuck ’em into India or Africa. 
Stacy has thrown back. Holliday hasn’t—he’s thrown 
forward, if anything. Still, he’ll fight. . . . They 

do. If there was ever to be another war . . .” 

But the Black ’Fourteen was yet in the womb of time. 

“Those beggars mean to come to-night,” he said 
aloud. “Don’t tell the women anything. They’ll be 
all on wires if they know. We’ll keep watch when 
they’ve turned in. First Blazes, nine till twelve; then 
I.” He did not mention that he had played Blazes, 
half an hour before, for the dangerous watch of the 
night, and had won it. “Then you come on about 
daybreak. I’ll wake you. Whoever’s on watch must 
keep awake, keep hidden, and keep quiet—damned quiet. 
Because, if it’s Malays, and they come for mischief, 
they’ll ambush the sentinel first thing.” 

“Well?” queried Holliday. 

But Plummer had said his say. He did not see any 
manner of benefit in the talking-over that he knew Hol¬ 
liday was wanting to begin. “He’s the talking kind,” 
ran Mark’s thoughts. “The less he chatters about it 
beforehand, the more he’s likely to do.” 


98 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“That’s all,” he said, curtly. He had no stomach 
for more conversation with Stacy’s husband than could 
be helped, in any case. 

“There’s going to be no Uriah the Hittite business 
here,” he thought, “no sending any etcetera’d husbands 
of any one into the forefront of the battle—but all 
the same, if you’d just get a Malay kris through what 
they used to call your weasand to-night, my man, I’d 
feel considerably obliged to you.” 

He was thinking of this later on, as they all sat to¬ 
gether round the hurricane lamp, campfires being, in 
that climate, good things to keep away from. He was 
thinking, and he was watching Stacy, though he seemed 
to be doing neither, being to all appearance fully occu¬ 
pied with the handful of tobacco he was cutting up and 
rubbing in his palms. He saw her very clearly with 
the corner of an eye, as she sat, chin cupped in her 
hand, looking silently across the sand and the moon- 
spangled sea, beyond the reefs and the lagoon, beyond 
the last pale line of foam crawling whither? . . . 

There was something in her attitude, in the down-bent 
head, that made him think of a picture he had seen in 
some exhibition named “The Captive”—a girl, seated 
on the desert sand, leaning her head on her hand, and 
musing. Slave was in every line of her delicate figure, 
weariness, patience, pain, showed in her eyes. 

Mark Plummer was sure, if he could see Stacy’s eyes 
just then, that they would look like the eyes of the pic¬ 
tured slave. A slow, hot fire began to creep through 
his veins. God! to set her free! 

But that no man could do; for the only way lay 
through muddy waters of open scandal and of secret 
shame, into which his love, he knew, would never set her 
feet. 


THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


99 


“Little white dove,” he thought, letting loose, in his 
heart, the passionate poetry that his lips could never 
speak—never would speak, even were the white dove his 
own—“little white dove—and they gave you to him!” 

In which, as one knows, he did the guardian of Stacy 
some injustice, for Stacy had given herself, tired of 
waiting—waiting for him. It was her only fault; and 
it had brought a bitter punishment. 

At that moment she, with her face half in shadow, 
was secretly watching him, even as he was watching her. 
She saw his profile clear against the moon; she fed her 
hungry soul guiltily on its strong, beautiful male 
lines. She dreamed of the eyes that were hidden by the 
dusk of night, eyes of a conqueror, of a leader of men, 
eyes that all women loved to look upon. . . . Did 

not Nydia? . . . Pah! No thought of Nydia 

and her sensuous fancies should be allowed to mar this 
hour. He was not Nydia’s—not in a hundred years. 
He was only hers. . . . But through all the sap¬ 

phire beauty of the moonlight, through the whisper of 
the reefy seas and the flow of the calling, intoxicating, 
soft trade wind, beat continually, like a fevered pulse, 
one hot, tormenting thought: Never. 

Charlie would not die. She did not want him to; 
he was her husband—she had a kind of love for him. 
But you may not want a man to die, and yet you may 
feel that his death would open gates of untold happi¬ 
ness ; you may wish those gates could open without his 
death. Divorce? Stacy was modern in a way; the 
thought did not make her shudder—if one could have 
got divorce, as in some countries, for reasons com¬ 
paratively decent. But in Australia—you would have 
to arrange desertion, which Holliday never would con¬ 
sent to, or you would have to prove sin on his part, 



100 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


and disprove condonation on her own. . . . She 

could not do that—even if she had been willing to think 
of a divorce at all. As to forcing his hand in any way 
-—giving him cause on her side—people did such things, 
as they did murder, and they forged names on checks. 
. . . One wasn’t a murderer, a forger, and—one 

did not use the word. It smelt ill. 

So since all these things were, as they were, one had 
to face the fact that Emily Bronte faced— 

Then did I learn existence could be cherished 
Strengthened and fed, without the aid of joy. 

She, Stacy, was only seven-and-twenty, and she had 
to learn that, and keep on repeating the lesson, for 
maybe fifty years. 

It came home to her then, for the first time, that life 
was not, and on the whole could not be, quite happy. 
People had said so thousands and thousands of times. 
She had supposed that, nevertheless, she was to be an 
exception, somehow. . . . When marriage proved 

disappointing, she had felt, unconsciously, that things 
would right themselves; she could not be doomed to real 
unhappiness . . . other people might be, but not 

she. 

Then the great star of love shone out, and for a 
while its rays were in her heart and in her eyes, and 
she could see nothing, feel nothing, but the wonder of 
that glory and that dream. Then- 

The dream did not fade, the glory did not disappear. 
But she came back to know she was on earth. She felt 
rough ground and stones beneath her feet; there were 
thorns to wound her hands; darkness and winds were 
round her. The star shone on—above, and far away. 



THE HAND IN THE NIGHT 


101 


Can one light one’s lamp and build one’s fire by a star? 

So Stacy, wife of Holliday, mused, as she sat with 
her chin on her hand, and looked out beyond the edge 
of the island. And the sum of her musings was sad¬ 
ness. And in her ears kept sounding, as the sea 
sounded on the foamy reef far away, the words of 
brave, ill-fated Emily Bronte’s verse— 


Without the aid of joy. 


CHAPTER VII 


BLOOD ON THE SANDS 

S TACY and Nydia were a little astonished that 
night, but not much, when Mark Plummer, who 
was by now acknowledged leader and master of 
the party, told them that the sleeping accommodation 
was to be changed. The men, he said, would take the 
girls’ room, and Nydia and Stacy would have the room 
previously used by Holliday, Tombazis, and himself. 
He gave no reason; Nydia Leven concluded that he 
wished to do something or other to show his authority. 
She admired him all the more for it—she was of the 
order of women who like what they call a “master.” 
Stacy did not think much about it, but concluded, on 
the whole, that it was probable Mark thought she 
would be more comfortable in the other room. 

The beds were shifted, and the men brought theirs in. 
“I want it understood,” said Plummer, when the 
women were gone to bed and the men gone out for a 
last smoke under the stars, “that I’m boss of this outfit, 
especially to-night. What I say will have to be done 
without back talk. Is that understood?” 

Tombazis, the strong man, nodded. He knew that 
there could not be two leaders when trouble was afoot. 
Holliday grunted somewhat unwillingly, “I suppose 
so.” 

“Well, then. Blazes has first watch. He’ll keep his 
102 


BLOOD ON THE SANDS 


103 


lookout down by the landing. I don’t believe any one 
can land at any other point than that one; the reefs 
don’t give a decent passage except there. I’ll keep 
mine all over the place; I’m a lighter weight, and can 
get about quietly. We may see and hear nothing all 
night. Or else we may be rushed by a boatful of Ma¬ 
lays. What firearms have you got?” He spoke to 
Holliday somewhat curtly; at times he found it hard 
to keep down his hatred of white-slave Stacy’s master. 

“Better than yours, I daresay,” was Holliday’s 
reply. “The newest make of automatic. Eight shots; 
pump them out as fast as you can wink, no cocking.” 

“Ever jam with you since you brought it to Papua?” 

“No,” said Holliday, loudly. 

“They do jam. I’ve known three white men killed 
and eaten because of that. It’s the climate. Better 
take my spare revolver.” 

“Thank you, I prefer my own weapons.” 

“Keep them, then; I daresay I can do better with 
two than one. What you got, Blazes?” 

Tombazis displayed a .45 Navy revolver and a long, 
wicked-looking knife. 

“Good; I know you’re a nasty hand with both. I 
make it that the cows will probably turn up to-night 
about three quarters of an hour later than they did 
last night—because they came at full tide; looks as if 
they’d some reef to get over that wasn’t safe otherwise. 
That would make it somewhere near two o’clock in my 
watch. But one can’t be sure; you have to remember 
that they’re probably as crafty as a bag of weasels. 
We may have big odds against us; we’ll have to keep 
our eyes skinned. You and I will turn in now, Holli¬ 
day.” 

He led the way into the house, and took for his bed 


104 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


the one that Stacy had occupied on the previous night. 
Holliday, lying near him, was shortly sound asleep. 

Mark Plummer kept awake. He knew that he could 
trust himself for twelve hours on a stretch; he was 
keeping double watch this night, and now was the first 
part of it. 

He lay very still, with the mosquito-net thrown back; 
there were few mosquitoes on Oro. One hand, the left, 
adorned with a ring he did not usually wear, hung down 
between the bed and the wall. 

The hours passed; ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, half¬ 
past eleven. Plummer had a radium-figured watch on 
one wrist; he could see the time by it without moving. 
A few minutes before twelve he decided that he had 
been mistaken in thinking the visitors of last night 
might vary their hour. Quite as likely his first idea was 
right. They would return at the same time, or a little 
later. It all depended on whether the tide was- 

For an instant the blood seemed to stand still in his 
veins. Then it rushed on, hot with the fighter’s joy 
of coming fight. A hand had touched his. 

Plummer did not move. He knew what the owner of 
the hand was trying to find out. If Stacy’s supposed 
hand remained quiet, it was, demonstrably, by the ring 
on it her hand and then it would appear that no 
change had been made in the sleeping arrangements, 
that no one had been alarmed by the incident of last 
night. Mark knew that his hand, strong though it 
was, was scarcely bigger than a girl’s, and he trusted 
that the difference in texture would not be perceptible. 
The groping hand passed very lightly over his; felt 
for the ring, and then drew back into vacancy. 

Mark lay very still. 

A faint breath of air, broadening to a gush, told him 



BLOOD ON THE SANDS 


105 


that the keen knife had noiselessly slit a bigger hole 
in the wall of plaited leaf. There was a pause. The 
unseen man outside was waiting to know if any one was 
alarmed. 

Mark was shamming. He thought he knew. . . 

Whiff! A scarf dropped over his face; was twisted 
and fastened tight. Mark struggled—not too hard. 
He had in spite of the heat kept the light blanket care¬ 
fully rolled about him. Somebody seized him skilfully 
by neck and knee and bundled him out through the 
opening in the wall. He had time to congratulate him¬ 
self on being a light weight, not, conceivably, much 
heavier than Stacy, before he was dumped on the 
ground, so that the unseen assailant might twist the 
scarf a little tighter. This was Mark’s opportunity. 
He flung himself forward with a sudden bound, tore his 
arms loose from the restraining long lean arm that 
held him, pulled his revolver out, and fired almost as 
he pulled. The clutching arm relaxed, there was a pig¬ 
like grunt, and something soft and limp fell tangling 
about his feet. He snatched the scarf from his face, 
and looked. ... It was clear starlight; he could 
see, on the gray grasses, a lump of patterned draperies, 
a dark neck and arm outflung. Something shone a 
little, down among the grass—something bright and 
wavy like a snake of steel. 

Mark Plummer, looking at the dead Malay, stood 
for no more than a moment. He knew that he had 
killed the man told off to capture Stacy while the 
others were attending to the men. Tombazis might 
be in difficulties directly; Holliday- 

He made a quick step into the tent, flashed an elec¬ 
tric torch for a moment, and looked. Holliday was 
lying oddly, half asleep, with eyes open. 



106 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“Lazy beggar,” thought Plummer, catching him by 
the shoulder. His hand came away wet. Another 
flash from the torch showed it red with blood. 

“God! They’ve got him!” was Plummer’s thought. 
He did not stop to examine the body; there was no 
time for that now. Stacy—Nydia. 

He made two steps into the women’s room. They 
were awake, and sitting up. They had heard the shot, 
but clearly knew nothing. 

“What is it?” asked Nydia. She was in a blue 
silk nightdress, her wonderful hair fell all over the 
bed, shining in the electric light. Stacy was sitting 
on the edge of her bed; she looked very boyish and 
piquant in her suit of pink pajamas, with her long 
brown hair plaited and wound closely round and 
round her head. She asked no questions, only looked 
at Mark. 

Plummer had taken one of his revolvers out of its 
holster. “Can you handle this ?” he asked Stacy. She 
nodded, looking up at him with eyes as large and shin¬ 
ing as a bat’s. 

He gave her the weapon. 

“It’s cocked,” he said. “Stay in the middle of the 
room till I come back, and fire if any one comes near.” 

“What about Charlie?” asked Stacy. 

“He’s all right,” lied Plummer, coolly. “He won’t 
come at present.” 

Nydia had her mouth open to ask half a dozen ques¬ 
tions, but he was gone. 

He went out swiftly to the back of the house. There 
was no one there. The starlight, wonderfully bright, 
as starlight is on a little coral island, shone on pale 
ferns and grasses, undisturbed; on beaches bare of life; 
on an empty sea. 


BLOOD ON THE SANDS 


107 


“Damn it, there must be more of them,” thought 
Plummer, moving cautiously, his revolver in his hand. 
The sight of something stirring in the bush made him 
raise the weapon and take aim; but in a moment he had 
lowered the long, blue-muzzled barrel again. It was 
Tombazis coming up from the landing place. 

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “I heard you 
shoot.” 

“Have you seen nothing?” 

“Not a thing. Has any one-” 

“They had me by the neck and heels, with a scarf 
over my face, taking me for Mrs. Holliday. They got 
Holliday, and I think they’re somewhere about. Don’t 
tell her. Go up at once to the women’s room and stay 
till I come back. If they get me, do the best you can— 
and don’t let them get her if you have to shoot her 
yourself.” 

“Right!” said Tombazis, running more lightly than 
one might have expected, from his size, toward the 
palm-leaf house. He was pleasurably excited; he held 
an unlit cigar between his teeth, and hummed a little 
melody: 

“Just a song at twilight, when the lights are low 
And the flickering shadows softly come and go,” 

he carolled, beneath his breath—Tombazis, on his way 
to what he hoped might be battle and sudden death—- 
not for himself, and not for the women either. 

“It won’t come to that, bless her delightful head,” 
he thought, as he ran. And the head he saw was 
Nydia’s; for Nydia was, naturally, “her” to him. 

Plummer, alone, ran hard down to the landing. 
There was not a soul there; the ivory-gray sands lay 



108 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


all empty to the stars, and no boat, or launch, or canoe 
had been moored in the lagoon, or pulled up on the 
beach. Yet, and yet, the man who had tried to carry 
off Stacy, in the person of himself, and who had so 
notably caught a Tartar, was not alone. Witness 
dead Holliday—Plummer was furiously certain that 
Holliday was dead. 

Back again to the palm-leaf house, lungs sore and 
heart pumping hard. Only Tombazis there—Tom- 
bazis peacocking gloriously before the women, and bid¬ 
ding them have no fear, quite oblivious of the fact that 
neither of them seemed particularly alarmed. Plum¬ 
mer left him there for the moment, and went up to a 
point at the back of the house which commanded, in the 
daytime, the best obtainable view of reef and sea. In 
the starry dusk he stood, looking and listening with 
every last power of ear and eye. There was one mur¬ 
derer, if not more, loose on Oro to-night, and if he were 
not discovered- 

What was that? God, what was it? 

From somewhere down among the reefs had come, 
first a dull sound of splashing and struggling, and then 
an appalling cry. It was more than a cry, it was a 
howl scarcely human. It sounded once more, in a dif¬ 
ferent tone, and then stopped, breaking off on the crest 
of a crescendo scream that made the skin on Mark 
Plummer’s head tighten and prickle. 

Plummer had been called the bravest man in Papua, 
and that says much—but he stood for a moment there 
on the grassy hill, unable to move. In another mo¬ 
ment he had cursed himself for a fool, and started run¬ 
ning down the hill toward the tangle of tide-bared 
reefs and pools lying pale in the starlight. On the 
edge of the reefs he paused, put his hand to his mouth, 



BLOOD ON THE SANDS 109 

and sent out a call. It was not answered. He waited 
a moment, and turned away. 

“Poor devils!” he said to himself. And again, as he 
ascended the hill, “Poor devils!” 

He flashed on his light as he came into the men’s 
room where Holliday was still lying on his bed. 
Stacy’s husband had not moved; his face was fishy- 
white. Plummer had to force himself to approach the 
bed and throw on the light; he feared to know. 

The dull eyes turned to meet him. 

“Beggar got me in the back,” said Holliday. “Ban¬ 
dage—doctor.” His eyes closed again, and his lips 
fell apart. He had fainted—had he? 

Plummer felt a hot flush of shame run up to his 
face as he bent over the wounded man, feeling his pulse. 
“If there’s any truth in the Bible yarns they used to 
stuff us kids with,” he thought, “I’m as good as a mur¬ 
derer. . . . That pulse is weak. I must get his 

wife in.” 

“Mrs. Holliday,” he said, aloud, “come in here, 
please. Your husband has got hurt.” 

Stacy, in a wrapper, was with him almost instantly. 
She had no shoes on; her small arched bare feet trod 
silently on the packed earth of the floor. She looked 
pale but quite calm. No questions came from her 
lips as she bent over her husband; she seemed absorbed 
in his injury. Plummer silently handed her a knife; 
she cut the pajama jacket off his back and looked at 
the wound, turning him with tender care. It was a 
deep, black stab; no blood was coming from it, but a 
stream had run down across the bed and on to the floor. 


CHAPTER VIII 


JAMMED 

T HIS is bad,” said Charlie Holliday’s wife, in a 
minute or two, standing up and looking at Mark 
across the bed. Again Mark felt ashamed of 
himself. It was so crystal-clear that Stacy was think¬ 
ing of nothing but the wound, whereas, in his rough 
masculine mind, the triumphant thought—“Mine— 
mine, perhaps!”—was already welling up. 

Could one help it, with Stacy’s slave-driver lying there, 
insensible, it might be dead? 

“Get me the whisky,” said Stacy, feeling Holliday’s 
pulse. 

“It’ll start the bleeding again, maybe.” 

“I know—but the risk’s less giving it. He’s very 
low. How was it no one found out?” 

Plummer, busy uncorking a bottle, answered the im¬ 
plied reproach simply: 

“We thought he was asleep.” 

“But I can’t understand why they would try to get 
him, they must have supposed he was Miss Leven. 
Perhaps he tried to fire. ... I begin to see!” 

He had brought over the whisky, and lifted Holli¬ 
day’s heavy head while Stacy deftly poured a little into 
the mouth, watching the while to see that there was no 
risk of choking. As he stood watching, his foot struck 
something hard. He looked down; it was Holliday~s 
automatic. 


110 


JAMMED 


111 


“I guessed right,” he said. “Jammed.” Stacy mo¬ 
tioned to him to lay down the head of the wounded 
man. He lowered it carefully, and then bent to pick 
up the pistol. “Yes,” he said, “I warned him of that.” 

“When?” asked Stacy. “You knew about this at¬ 
tack?” 

Mark Plummer looked at her with admiration. Here 
was a woman who actually took for granted things that 
had occurred, and didn’t want to have them talked and 
chewed all over. She had never once asked him, “What 
has happened?” 

“We thought it likely, after the alarm you had,” he 
answered her. “It seems to have been Malays from the 
Dutch side.” 

Stacy, watching her husband for the effect of the 
stimulant, asked no more. There had been a shot; 
some one had been stabbed; the people who had done it 
had clearly got away. That was enough for her. 
There was work on hand of more importance than gos¬ 
siping. 

1 “I think,” she said, presently, laying down the limp 
hand—too soft, too pinky-white for a man’s—“he’s 
dead. It looks to me like internal hemorrhage. 
Where’s the nearest doctor ?” 

“Thursday Island.” 

“How long would it take to get him down?” 

“Might be done in two or three days.” 

Stacy looked for the first time a little dismayed. 

“It might as well be a month,” she said. “I’m quite 
sure something ought to be done immediately.” She 
held up the whisky glass. “I gave him hardly any; I 
saw he was vomiting blood in the glass. Look!” 

Plummer looked, and said nothing. He knew very 
well the injury was bad. 


112 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“You can do nothing more,” he told her presently, 
“except keep him quiet. I’ve seen some wounds. 
. . . Don’t let him move, and give him all the cold 

water he wants if he asks for it. You’ll stay here till 
morning?” 

Stacy cast him a glance of astonishment. 

“I should think so,” she answered. 

“Well, Blazes and I had better keep moving about. 
I don’t think those men will come back. No.” He 
thought of the scream down among the reefs; the si¬ 
lence that had followed. “But we may as well keep 
watch. When it’s daylight, we’ll have another look at 
Holliday.” 

He went out, carrying with him the vision of Holli¬ 
day’s wife, pearl-pale, lily-slender, bending over the 
bed, her dark eyes wide and inscrutable. He won¬ 
dered what she might be thinking about. He would 
have given much to know. 

Outside, Nydia, all blue and gold, was sitting on an 
empty packing case, and assuring the deeply interested 
Blazes that she had cold shivers running up and down 
her back. “Like snakes,” she said. “They keep com¬ 
ing and going ever since I heard that awful shot and 
saw that awful sight.” 

“Why, my dear lady, I didn’t know you had seen the 
delightful corpse,” said Tombazis. 

Nydia jumped to her feet, the affectation shaken out 
of her. “Corpse!” she cried. “Whose? Here?” 

“Out at the back of the hut. Plummer stopped him 
one!” 

“Corpse? It was a live man I saw. Corpse? How 
awful! The very thought makes me sick. Where is it 
now? Can I see it?” 

“You can see as many beautiful corpses as you 


JAMMED 


113 


choose, dear lady, but I’d like you to tell me what aw¬ 
ful sight you saw first.” 

“It was before the shot,” explained Nydia, greatly 
enjoying her position as imparter of news. “Stacy and 
I were lying quite still, and she was asleep. She sleeps 
so heavily; now, I sleep as lightly—oh, as a bird.” 

Mark looked at her from under his heavily lined 
black eyebrows. “You are a bit of a liar, my lady,” he 
thought. “You forget I’ve heard you snore.” 

Nydia went on: “It makes my blood run cold to re¬ 
member it.” She drew herself together, shiveringly, 
to illustrate her blood running cold. “I happened to 
be looking at the doorway, and as I looked, I saw—a 
shadow.” 

She made a dramatic pause. 

“I thought it was one of you, and then—something 
told me it was not. It had a kind of petticoat on-” 

“That was what the Americans call real cute of 
you,” observed Mark Plummer, admiringly, “to remem¬ 
ber I don’t wear a petticoat, mostly.” 

Nydia cast him a doubtful glance. He returned it 
with one that, in the lamplight, looked childishly inno¬ 
cent. There were people in “Port” and Samarai who 
were wont to say that Mark Plummer was like a cer¬ 
tain famous actress in that no one on earth could pos¬ 
sibly be so innocent as he, on occasion, looked. 

“I sat up silently,” she went on. “I saw the Thing 
disappear. Then a shot rang out. I started.” She 
illustrated the start. “Immediately I rose; I was pre¬ 
pared for the worst. But in an instant Captain Tom- 
bazis dashed in, saw that we were safe and dashed away 
again. I heard Mr. Plummer go down to the shore. 
He came back again, and all was over, and there was 
only Mrs. Holliday in the next room talking to her 



114 THE SANDS OF ORO 

husband.” She looked at Mark, to see how he liked 
that. 

“All correct,” agreed Mark, gently, “except for one 
or two things. I killed the chap who took me for Mrs. 
Holliday and tried to carry me away. Scott, but he 
must have been sold when I began to kick him off! 
Wonder what size shoe he thought the lady took. 
. . . But he hadn’t long to wonder. As for Mrs. 

Holliday, she was talking to me; we were trying to fix 
up her husband. Seems the other chap—the one told 
off to capture you”—turning to Nydia, who made 
great eyes at the idea of being captured—“tried to get 
hold of Holliday, and Holliday wasn’t quick enough, or 
more likely his automatic wasn’t—anyway, it’s jammed 
—and the mean cow got a knife into him, and messed 
him up badly.” 

“Will he die?” asked Nydia, looking up through a 
veil of sparkling hair. Tombazis drew his breath in. 
“By Gooseberry,” he murmured, “but you are a d— 
a deli— you are a damn lovely woman, bless your 
eyes!” 

“He won’t die,” Mark answered. Nydia’s thought, 
as he read it, looked all the uglier for having been his 
own thought—with a difference—not so long before. 

There was a moment’s silence. Then Mark Plum¬ 
mer spoke. “Tombazis,” he said, “you’d better get 
down to the landing. I don’t think there’s a chance in 
a hundred that we’ll be disturbed again. Still—I’ll 
stop near the hut.” 

“And I?” asked Nydia, with disarming meekness. 

Plummer was lighting his pipe, which may have been 
the reason for his not looking up. 

“You,” he said, “can go back to bed.” 

Nydia rose at once from the packing case and 


JAMMED 


115 


slipped away. In all her movements, meekness, obedi¬ 
ence, were expressed. She went into her room. 

Mark Plummer, pacing round the house a few min¬ 
utes later, found her, a glistening shadow, kneeling on 
the grass by the dead Malay and curiously staring at 
him in the pale starlight. She gave a squeak when she 
saw Plummer. 

Being very much a man, Mark did what she had 
hoped, in a startled instant, he would do—he swung 
her up in the curve of one lean powerful arm and de¬ 
posited her, after three steps, none too gently on her 
bed. 

“Stay there, you little minx,” he said. Nydia gig¬ 
gled. 

“He’d like to box my ears,” she thought. She did 
not stop her giggle because she saw Stacy, like a white 
ghost, glide in from the other room. “Let her be,” she 
thought. 

Stacy had seen. Her voice was cold as she said to 
Mark—womanlike, ignoring the woman: 

“There’s the masthead light of a big ship somewhere 
out there. We ought to try and signal for a doctor.” 


CHAPTER IX 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 

T HE gunboat was no giant of the seas, but her 
wet gray sides seemed to stand up very tall over 
Tombazis’s whaleboat. A Jacob’s ladder had 
been flung down from the deck; it dangled in and out, 
beating against the sides of the ship as she rolled in 
the swell that came in from the Arafura Sea. Dawn 
was just breaking; the ship’s electric lights looked 
garish and theatrical though it was not yet time to 
put them out. 

An officer in dressing-gown and pajamas leaned over 
to hail Tombazis. 

“We saw your rocket signal,” he said. “What’s the 
trouble ?” 

“Man stabbed badly. He won’t live till night as he 
is.” 

“On Oro? Thought it was uninhabited.” 

“It was till a few days ago.” 

The officer moved back, and exchanged a few words 
with an older, stouter man. 

“I’ll let you have our doctor for half an hour,” he 
called. “We happen to be in a considerable hurry, 
and these reefs are no place for us. By the way, how 
did he get stabbed?” 

“Party of Malays landed during the night.” 

“Oh, indeed! Are they gone?” 

116 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 117 


“Yes, all of them,” replied Blazes, innocently. “You 
might find some trace of them outside.” 

“That would be the abandoned lugger we saw,” said 
the officer. “The doctor will go with you. I can’t 
give you a minute more than half an hour. If the man 
can be helped by moving, we’Jl shift him for you, but I 
won’t promise where.” 

There was a brief interval while somebody dressed, 
and then the doctor, a little elderly and a trifle fat, 
came down the ladder, and bumped into Tombazis’s 
boat. 

“Shake her up,” cried the Irish-Greek to his crew. 
“Shake her, or I’ll shake the delightful souls out of 
your bodies, you blessed bullfinches, when we get 
ashore!” 

Against the rolling sides of the gunboat, the sea beat 
with a slapping sound as they shoved off. Pink 
lights were on the water; dawn had come. In an in¬ 
stant the silver electrics of the ship winked out and 
she rolled, an ugly hulk, dusk against the rising fires 
of the east. 

Followed half an hour and more of waiting. The 
Commander paced the quarter-deck, looked out across 
the maze of reefs to Oro, now green and clear in the 
pure light of morning, bit on his cigarette, and swore 
a little. 

H. M. S. Aulis was bent on special service the na¬ 
ture of which was haste. But one could not leave a 
British subject to die of a knife wound only a mile 
away. . . . As for the row that had caused it, 

thought the Commander, that would have to keep. He 
was doing a great deal in hanging up his ship off these 
damned reefs, as it was. And when was that entirely 
cursed doctor coming back? 


118 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


The Commander went into his cabin and dressed. 
When he came out again, full primed with a Com¬ 
mander’s special brand of professional rage, and ready 
to send off a boat instantly in chase of the doctor, he 
was mollified by the sight of Tombazis’s whale boat 
flying hard before the wind toward the man-of-war. 
In her stern could be seen, through a glass, the doc¬ 
tor, Tombazis, and one other—a man lying back, 
motionless. 

“Who’ve you got there?” hailed the Commander, in 
no gentle voice, as the boat drew alongside. 

“I thought, sir,” said the doctor, in a tone discreetly 
subservient, “that you might allow me to take him with 
us. He is quite certain to die within a few hours un¬ 
less I perform an operation. It’ll be a nice operation,” 
he added, with a sparkle in his eye. 

“Bring him up,” was the Commander’s reply. “And 
pretty damned quick, too.” He turned round and 
swung into his cabin. It seemed clear that the doc¬ 
tor’s humanitarian impulses did not meet with much 
sympathy on the part of his superior. 

The doctor, seizing on the permission, Hastened to 
see his patient skilfully carried up in an improvised 
litter and taken to the sick-bay. Tombazis, below, 
watched the evolution with interest and approval. 

“You can bring him back, doctor,” he bellowed, 
“when you like, and if you don’t like, not at all.” 

“He’ll be landed for you somewhere when I’ve fixed 
him up,” replied the doctor, judiciously. He knew 
very well that nothing was more unlikely than the re¬ 
turn of the Aulis to the neighbourhood of Oro, part of 
the seas deservedly cursed by all captains. 

“Thank you, doctor, and if I wouldn’t do the same 
for you and your captain any time, you may cut my 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 119 


heart and liver out and throw them to the blazing 
sharks. Good luck to you, and as many sweethearts 
for you as there are beautiful hairs on your delightful 
heads! Good-bye, Captain! Good-bye, Doctor!” 

The telegraph had already sent its sharp signal 
down to the engine-room, the engine-room had replied. 
A foamy whirlpool was gathering round the gunboat’s 
screws. She wasted no time; before Tombazis’s whale¬ 
boat had been fairly brought up into the wind, the 
Aidis, with Holliday aboard, was tramping her way 
out toward the Arafura Sea. 

All had happened so swiftly—the attack in the night, 
the disappearance of the unseen assailants, Holliday’s 
wounding, the brief, decisive visit of the doctor, fol¬ 
lowed by the rapid carrying away of the patient—that 
the rest of the party, when they gathered a little later 
round their packing-case breakfast table, found them¬ 
selves almost unable to realize that anything at all had 
occurred. Last night, Holliday had been there at 
dinner time, taking the best of the pawpaws, and grum¬ 
bling over the quality of the tinned meat. This morn¬ 
ing they sat round the same table, after a few hours’ 
interval, and he was scores of miles away, badly 
wounded, in the sick-bay of a man-of-war, bound 
whither no man knew. 

And here, on Oro, the morning sun shone not less 
crystalline, the wild bush honeysuckles smelled not 
less sweet, the small waves ruffled not less gaily in the 
safe lagoon, because one man was gone. And the 
woman whose heart should have been breaking to think 
of him and his peril on the seas sat calmly eating her 
breakfast, keeping back the gay chatter that flooded to 
her lips only because she was ashamed to give it vent. 

Stacy, in truth, was almost horrified at herself. She 


120 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


did not knew—being after all but a new married 
woman, and not given to gossip with other wives—how 
many women, happily married, as the world interprets 
the term, draw a secret sigh of relief when the hoofs of 
the horse beat away into distance, or the motor-car 
goes purring down the road, leaving behind it—Free¬ 
dom ! 

One may love a man very well and yet feel the hap¬ 
pier for his absence—just at first. And if one does 
not love him; if one has borne his presence but through 
a sense of duty; if the wedding ring, at times, has 
weighed as heavily as a captive’s iron chain—what 
then? 

Mrs. Charlie Holliday knew “what then.” It was 
brightening the bright sunlight, perfuming the per¬ 
fumed air, for her this morning. She was no little 
vexed with herself when she remembered that the man 
who had been the master of her life was possibly, at 
that moment, lying dead; but she was too honest to 
deny the facts to her own mind. 

In any case, she had no time to brood. It had been 
an understood thing that she was to be housekeeper 
for the expedition, and the boys needed looking after. 
Nydia, serene in the knowledge that she had paid her 
way, would have seen Stacy drop on the sand exhausted 
before she would have spent a moment in the kitchen- 
hut, spoiling her complexion over the fire, or troubled 
herself to issue supplies from the stores of the ship’s 
lazarette, check them, and take back what was over, 
as Stacy conscientiously did. 

Besides, her covetous soul was beginning to get anx¬ 
ious over the treasure for which they were supposed to 
be looking. She had determined to tackle Mark about 
it, and she did not want Stacy to be there. 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 121 


By and by, the calmness, the soft peace, of the island 
morning settled down. By and by, the boys had gone 
with busy Stacy to the schooner, to carry up the stores 
that Tombazis gave out. The palms were fluttering 
to the rising stream of the “trade” in the glad, care¬ 
free way that only palm trees have. The little water- 
wagtails were running on the beach, “seeking their meat 
from God.” If you stood very still, and listened with¬ 
out thinking at all—which is a hard thing to do—you 
could hear the sands of Oro, and the creatures of Oro, 
and the whole, lonely, bright little land of Oro, sing¬ 
ing in its happiness, even as the morning stars once 
sang together. 

But in that happiness you would feel that you had 
little part. You would feel, vaguely, and with some 
disquiet, that, as Stacy once had said, “it did not want 
you.” 

This is a mystery; lovers of wild lands feel it, but 
none, for all their thinking, can untie the knot that 
binds the secret. 

“When are we going to look for the treasure?” asked 
Nydia Leven. 

Nydia always dressed for any part she thought she 
might have to play. This morning she had fastened 
herself into a little white frock that was so innocent, 
any ordinary man would have called it “dimity, or 
something,” and priced it at a pound. (Nydia’s 
tailor had called it white gaberdine, and priced it at 
fifteen pounds six.) She had also done her hair in the 
innocent fashion once made famous by Cleo Merode. 
She was gentle and soft; she cared this morning a good 
deal about the treasure, and a little more about Mark 


122 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Plummer, whose tall fine figure, shown against the sky¬ 
line as she approached, she had called, in her own mind, 
“royal.” 

“Where,” she said to herself, “did he, in his shearing 
sheds and mining camps, pick up such perfect man¬ 
ners? Only the Very Best people can look and speak 
like that. Perhaps he was not really the son of his 
supposed parents. I don’t think he can have been; 
blood tells,” thought Nydia, daughter of attorneys. 

But she paid close attention to his answer. Darling 
money was in question. 

“I’ve been looking for it already,” was Mark’s 
reply, “and I mean to look for it some more.” 

“When?” 

“Can’t do much till Blazes runs down to T. I. and 
fetches diving gear.” 

“How deliciously interesting! Is it under water?” 

“I think it likely. Shell keeps under water a good 
while, anyhow. I’m more sure than I was, if it wanted 
that. Those cows last night prove it. They didn’t 
come here to pick daisies.” 

“Did you bury the poor man you killed ?” 

“No fear. I dumped him over the reef.” 

“I think you’re very heartless.” 

“Right. What did you want to know about the 
shell, Miss Leven? I’ll be glad to tell you anything.” 

“I want to know everything,” said Nydia, promptly, 
“and I want to come with you when you look for it 
to-day.” 

Plummer seemed to consider. 

“You can do that,” he said presently, “but don’t 
blame me if you see things you mayn’t like.” 

“You sound delightfully interesting. What’s to 
prevent our going now?” 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 123 


“Nothing in the world,” answered Mark, who was not 
averse to the company of a pretty woman at any time, 
though he despised this one almost as much as he ad¬ 
mired her. 

Nydia pressed down her sun-hat with a jewelled hand, 
and put up her parasol. 

“Let’s go,” she said. 

And Mark, in his own mind, observed—“I’ll make 
the little witch squeak this morning. She shall see all 
she’s a mind to.” 


Over the reefs, and over the reefs, and over the reefs, 
in the flaming sun of ten o’clock, balancing on hedge¬ 
hogs of live coral, threading shallow water-gardens 
that scratched the unwary ankle with their saw-like 
flowers, stepping on gigantic mushrooms made of bis¬ 
cuit china, that went down with a smash, and landed 
one in a pool full of slimy, squirming horrors; picking 
one’s way, like a cat in walnut-shells, across intermi¬ 
nable flats of stony honeycomb; losing, by degrees, 
coolness, trimness, dryness, and dignity—so went 
Nydia, with Mark Plummer. He helped her along 
gallantly enough, but no one can do much in the way 
of assisting another across a coral reef at low tide, and 
Nydia ran her full share of mischances. In the end, 
following the sea as it retreated, they won to the outer 
edge of the reef, and stood where many have found it 
chilled the blood to stand—on the edge of the gigantic 
submerged wall that is a coral reef. Behind was the 
comparative safety of the shallow gardens and pools; 
before them, depths unplumbed and blackish blue, with 
silver-coloured coral cliffs descending and descending 
under water into the dark. 


124 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Nydia blanched as she looked down with the water 
close to her feet. 

“I don’t like it,” she said. “It seems like going to 
the end of the world and looking over the edge.” 

Somewhere far under water the sea gurgled and 
coughed in its throat. Presently among the smooth 
ridges of the ground-swell that was swinging along the 
reef a tussock of foam appeared and burst into the 
creaming bubbles like soda-water. 

“That shows there’s a cave down there. Lots of 
queer things live in coral caves,” observed Mark. 

“Do they ever come out?” asked Nydia. 

Instead of answering her, Plummer cast a glance back 
across the reef they had traversed. He seemed to see 
something that attracted his attention. 

“Look there,” he pointed. Nydia looked. The sun 
was dazzling so strongly upon the reef and its many 
pools that for a moment she could not see anything. 
Then she became aware of a stealthy movement some¬ 
where among the brightest of the pools. 

“What is it?” she asked, instinctively clutching at 
Plummer’s sleeve. 

“Octopus,” he answered her. She had got hold of 
him on the right arm, so he used his left hand to get a 
cigarette and to bring his matches down to the other 
imprisoned hand. He did not seem to know she was 
touching him. 

Nydia let out a brief, involuntary scream. She was 
too modern to squall honestly like a Victorian maiden, 
but she felt sadly inclined to do so. 

“Don’t let it get me,” she begged, staring at the 
dazzle of reef and sunlight and at the black creeping 
thing that she now could see clearly. It was like a 
gigantic spider; it went looping along the reef, throw- 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 125 


ing out dark tentacles that held and sprawled. Nydia 
began to wish that she had never come. 

“Don’t worry,” said Mark, calmly. “Have a cig¬ 
arette. He’s too far off to do you any harm. And 
anyhow he couldn’t hurt you if you stabbed him prop¬ 
erly.” He showed her the long native spear that was 
tucked under his arm. But Nydia, in the face of that 
hideous thing, felt little reassured. 

“How do I know there aren’t more of them?” she 
asked, tremblingly. 

“You can’t know,” replied Mark, promptly, “because, 
as a matter of fact, there are any amount of them. I 
was just wondering why we hadn’t seen more. Funny 
thing about those octopuses is that you never can rely 
on their habits or on what they will or won’t do. 
Won’t you try that cigarette? It’s a good brand.” 

“No, I won’t,” said Nydia, feeling more than ever 
inclined to cry. “I couldn’t think of anything but the 
- Oh! Oh!” 

“What is it?” 

Nydia was standing on the far edge of the reef, 
whither she had retreated, in an impulse urging her to 
get as far away as possible from the quite sufficiently 
distant octopus. She now turned her back on the 
shore, and bent curiously, fearfully over the verge of 
the reef. The waves sucked up about her feet and 
wetted her shoes, but she did not seem to notice. 

“I saw something,” she said, white-faced. “Some¬ 
thing light-coloured—like a—like a-” 

“Like what ?” asked Mark, putting away his cigarette 
case. 

“It couldn’t be—but it was like bones.” 

“Scott, but it could be,” contradicted Plummer, 
waking up to sudden interest. “Let’s have a- By 





126 THE SANDS OF ORO 

Jove, that wants looking into. Mind if I take off my 
boots?” 

“What are you going to do?” cried Nydia, in a 
voice three notes higher than usual. 

Plummer did not answer; he was too busy unlacing 
his boots and rolling his trousers high above the knee. 
He kept his socks on; the coral was hard to walk on. 

“Don’t mind my leaving you for a minute?” he said 
to Nydia, taking off his Australian felt hat and laying 
it, with some care, on a projecting coral knob. 

“Mr. Plummer, you sha’n’t—you daren’t!” cried 
Nydia, now fully roused. Mark paid no attention to 
her at all except to remark, “Sorry—only a minute,” 
as he put his hands up, and went neatly, with a shallow 
dive, down into the blue-black waters. 

Nydia, terrified half out of her mind, burst into 
tears. “I wish I’d never come,” she sobbed. “Oh, 
oh, oh, how can he? He’ll be drowned and eaten. Oh, 
that thing behind-” She turned to look at the octo¬ 

pus. It was gone, but that was small comfort to 
Nydia, for three others, looping about with horrid ac¬ 
tivity, were visible on another part of the reef. 

“Mark, Mark!” she screamed. “Come up—I can’t 
stand it. They’ll get you and me, too. Oh, God, 
what did I ever come for?” 

She bent over the sucking, swaying reef edge, and 
stared down. She could see a pale figure wavering 
about somewhere below. Once it vanished altogether, 
and Nydia bit her nails and stamped with fright. But 
it came back again, and shot up to the surface, beating 
with both hands. In a moment Mark Plummer’s drip¬ 
ping head emerged. 

“Give me a hand,” he gasped. She leaned over and 
pulled him up the spiky rock. He was carrying in his 



THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 127 


teeth the native spear that he had brought away from 
the camp. Sitting on a smooth lump of brainstone, 
and panting more than a little with the stress of his 
late exertions, he dropped the spear, as a dog drops a 
stick it had brought out from a swim, and said, cheer¬ 
fully: 

“Scott, that was a near one.” 

“What was?” demanded Nydia, one eye on the stroll¬ 
ing octopuses. 

“Big one down below. Just what I thought there 
would be. Those other ones—not a circumstance to 
him. The cow had eyes on him like tea trays.” He 
was still a little breathless, but he did not look per¬ 
turbed. 

“You went down—among those awful devils of things. 
Oh, you are mad!” cried Nydia, with a flood of admira¬ 
tion, nevertheless, surging through her heart. What 
kind of man was he who did such deeds? Now if it had 
been to rescue her—one could understand any one being 
heroic in such a cause. But that a man should venture 
his life in a most horrible way just to see things—to 
look for something or other, not yet explained—that he 
should jump over that awful verge into the very den of 
a giant octopus—Nydia did not know whether to de¬ 
spise him, or to fling her arms round his neck. . . . 

Plummer’s entire absence of self-consciousness saved 
him. “Look here,” he said, rising to his feet—he had 
put on his boots again, and stood, a fine figure of manly 
strength and activity, careless and dripping wet upon 
the rock—“I didn’t go down for nothing.” He held 
up something triangular and white—a piece of broken 
coral, it seemed, with seaweed tangled on it. 

So Nydia thought at first; and almost immediately 
her heart gave a leap of horror as she realized that it 


128 THE SANDS OF ORO 

was a fragment of a human skull to which dark hair 
still clung. 

“That was where one of the beggars went,” explained 
Plummer, cheerfully. “Must have been crossing the 
reef at low tide in the dark, and the beauty I saw down 
below was probably out for an airing, going hippity- 
hoppity along the coral, like those over there, and got 
the Malay as he was making off. He was the daddy 
of them all.” 

“Who, the Malay?” 

“No, the octopus. You should have seen him.” 

“Ugh!” shuddered Nydia. Then, fearfully, “How r 
was it he didn’t get you?” 

“Me? I poked him in the belly with the spear. 
There’s a right place to get, I didn’t quite get it, but 
I distracted his attention enough to make a bolt. Con¬ 
found the- Did you ever notice that salt water 

makes the worst kind of knots in bootlaces?” 

Nydia stared at him. She could not understand this 
man. Heroic as he was, she would have preferred some 
little posturing—just the suspicion of a pose. 

She thought him almost unnatural. And so he was, 
from the Nydia point of view. 

Plummer had tied his boots. He had tossed away 
the grisly piece of skull. 

“That proves something to me,” he said. “The 
cache is this side of the island, maybe—this bay. It 
wasn’t a good place to cross the reef. Yet they came 
here.” He fell to musing for a minute. Nydia, star¬ 
ing hypnotized at the crawling octopuses, which never 
ceased their disgusting undulant motion, felt more 
than ever as if she were immersed in some horrible 
dream. 

“Mr. Plummer,” she cried, tugging at his soaked 



THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 129 


sleeve. “Let’s go back. I’ve had enough of this. 
It’s the most awful island I ever heard of.” 

“Yes,” said Plummer, coming out of his reverie. 
“The old Jap chose it well, didn’t he? But there’s 
nothing so uncommon. Warrior Reef is as bad. 
There are places like this, here and there, and he knew 
it. Well, Miss Nydia, we’ve not done so badly for one 
morning. We may be getting back now.” 

“You won’t go down into that awful place again? 
Please—please don’t!” 

“Oh, I don’t need to. I’ve found out what I wanted 
more or less. How about lunch?” 

“Don’t go where those horrible things are,” begged 
Nydia, eyeing the distant octopuses. They were still 
looping about; she thought they were coming nearer, 
although they were much less clearly perceptible than 
before. On the cream-coloured coral reefs they stood 
out black no longer, but glistened an ugly spotty buff. 

“Plenty of them everywhere,” said Mark, encourag¬ 
ingly. “Don’t you worry; you’re perfectly safe. Only 
I wouldn’t advise you to cruise about alone. They’ve 
a way of taking on the colour of their surroundings— 
like chameleons-” 

“Why, that’s what they’ve done now!” 

“Yes. Beastly habit they have. They mean noth¬ 
ing by it, just a way of passing the time when things 
get duller than usual, same as you pass the time trying 
a new brand of powder, you know, or a pink lip-salve 
instead of a red.” 

“Mr. Plummer, you’re talking frightful nonsense.” 

“That’s right. Take my arm here. I’ll get you 
along. The tide’s coming in pretty sharply now.” 
He chattered on, diverting her attention from what he 
did not mean her to see—another of the big octopuses. 



130 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


which was following them up like a dog as they went. 
Mark thought that he could manage it with his spear 
but thought also that he would rather not have to try. 
It was only a matter of putting on a bit of speed. 

There! they had done it. The safe, wide sandy 
shore was reached, the dangerous stretch of coral reef 
passed over, and Nydia had not been alarmed. Mark 
was congratulating himself in having manoeuvered so 
well when the thanksgiving was cut short upon his 
lips by the sight of Stacy and Tombazis just turning 
a corner. He wondered how much they had seen. It 
was one thing to be chased by a slimy, looping octopus 
all across the reef, in company with Nydia; another 
to know that Stacy had seen the whole thing. She 
would think he wanted to be with Nydia; she would 
think him careless; she would suppose he ran continual 
silly risks, and made others run them. Actually, he 
had never anticipated any of the big octopuses coming 
out of their pools in daylight, but, as he had told Nydia 
Leven, you never could reckon upon what any of them 
might or might not do. 

It was with rather a guilty look that he approached 
Stacy and the Captain. Nydia, on the contrary, came 
up to them with the air of a peacock bent on displaying 
its train. She had carried off Plummer, she had kept 
him all morning, and it was nothing at all to her that 
he knew she had done it deliberately. Nydia realized 
that the great thing is to get hold of a man—decently 
if you can, but anyhow get hold of him. From the 
bottom of her heart she despised Stacy for not knowing 
as much. And she despised her, too, for not being able 
to keep Plummer out of her, Nydia’s, reach. 

Of the type of mind that would rather let go any 
love on earth than raise a finger to keep it against its 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 131 


will Nydia knew nought. Nor would she have be¬ 
lieved in it if you had told her about it. “People take 
what they can,” would have been her comment, as it 
was the guiding motto of her life. 

Mark Plummer, however, ceased to consider such sub¬ 
tleties very soon—just as soon, in fact, as he had had 
time to observe the expression on Tombazis’s face. 
When the Captain looked at Nydia, Plummer, the man 
of the wilderness, knew just what force was lent to 
human passions by the isolation, the monotony, of 
places such as Oro. He had seen in such places men 
who loved as brothers kill each other because of some 
slight misunderstanding; had seen, on a Westralian 
early gold-field, one woman, married to a husband whom 
she loved, set light to red fury, hatred, and madness, 
among a hundred men. He knew, the instant he looked 
at Tombazis, that there was trouble brewing. 

Being a wise man, he took no notice, but asked if 
lunch was nearly ready, and observed that he would 
have to change his clothes before he joined them. 
Stacy put no questions whatever; she scarcely spoke. 
What she was thinking, or feeling, he could only guess. 
Nydia burst out with the whole story of the octopus 
and the skull and Plummer’s foolhardy dive, as they 
all walked back along the sands together. Mark tried 
to see Stacy’s face but could make nothing of it except 
that she seemed paler than usual. He put the matter 
out of his mind; jealousies of women mattered little in 
view of that which he had glimpsed in the fierce, passion¬ 
ate face of the Irish-Greek. 

They had lunch; no one seemed inclined to talk, and 
Plummer had to make conversation for the rest. He 
praised the cooking that Stacy had superintended, and 
told her he reckoned she was the only cook he had ever 


132 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


known who could be reckoned on not to get “cook-itis.** 
Nobody asked him what cook-itis was, so he had to 
explain unasked. 

“I’ve noticed it all over the world,” he said. “It’s 
a disease of cooks, and they all seem to get it once in 
a way. Nigger cooks on scows, as well as cooks who 
wear white caps, on the P. and O’s, and the horrible 
creatures you get a glimpse of in boarding-houses, and 
the fat women who wear cooky sort of black silks in 
their off time, and look after the chow in country hotels 
—oh, and the chefs of hash-houses like the ‘Australia,’ 
and shearer cooks up country, and ‘Mums’ on the dairy 
farms—they’re all alike, they all get cook-itis just once 
so often, and you have to stand clear till they get over 
it. They fly off the handle, and smash things, and if 
they’re women, they finish up by a good cry, and take 
it out of the cooking sherry, and if they’re men, they 
paste the cook’s-mate one in the eye, and shift a bottle 
of whisky. And then there’s peace again, and pie that 
is pie, not cremated insurrection.” 

“This is quite a nice pie,” said Nydia, patronizingly. 
“I don’t mind if Captain Tombazis cuts me another 
piece of it.” 

Tombazis, who had charge of the pie, stabbed it 
fiercely with a knife, and disembowelled it in a manner 
that, as Nydia subsequently remarked to Stacy, was 
“almost indecent.” He filled her plate, and then, 
knife still in hand, fell into an ugly reverie, staring at 
the far lagoon. 

Nydia regarded him under her eyelashes, and ab¬ 
sent-mindedly took his enamel pannikin instead of her 
own to drink out of. She apologized prettily, at once, 
and handed it back. Blazes woke, took up the pannikin, 
and deliberately kissed the spot where her lips had 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 133 


rested. Then he drank the water, put the pannikin in 
his breast pocket, and, folding his arms across it, glared 
at Mark Plummer. The scene was comic, but no one 
felt like laughing. 

“I’ll have to get hold of this joker for a quiet yarn 
before he rips the inside out of me in a moment of 
pardonable enthusiasm,” thought Mark, finishing his 
own lunch calmly. He was hungry, and trifles such as 
impending battle, murder, and sudden death did not 
impair his healthy appetite. 

But Nydia had made her plans, and after lunch, 
Mark saw, with some amusement, that she had contrived 
to lure Tombazis away by himself to the schooner. It 
seemed plain that she meant to have the quiet yarn 
herself. 

Afternoon tea in this Land of Lots-of-Time was 
always served by Tombazis’s native boys at four o’clock 
under the shadow of the palm-leaf veranda, and the ad¬ 
venturers were wont to enjoy it quietly, savouring to 
the full the delightful knowledge that nobody could 
“drop in,” that there was nothing in particular to do, 
and that trams, trains, and motor-cars were not. 

That day the tray was brought as usual up from 
the cook-house, but only Stacy and Mark Plummer 
were waiting at the table. 

“Where’s the Captain?” asked Mark, with his eternal 
pipe in the corner of his mouth. He did not care to 
court further misunderstandings by asking where was 
Nydia. 

The boy handed a note to Mrs. Holliday before 
replying. 

“Captain, he talk he go Turdy Islan’ too-morrow, 
he makem altogether something blong him.” 


134 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


By this slice of pidgin-English, he meant to convey 
that Tombazis was starting for Thursday Island next 
morning, and was, in consequence, busy packing things 
up and getting the ship ready. 

“Time he did think of it. We can’t get much further 
without the diving gear,” observed Mark. 

Stacy had read her note, and handed it over. 

Dear Mrs. Holliday, 

I have decided to run the KiJcenni down to T. I. Will 
get off to-morrow at daylight. Am taking all the stores 
out except those needed for the trip, and having the boys 
carry them to the cook-house. Would advise you keep a 
sharp lookout they don’t shake them, as they will try it 
on when my back is turned. Am leaving you two boys, 
rest will be wanted as crew, hope to be back in a few days, 
good-bye and good luck if I don’t have time to come up to 
the house to-night, as I may sleep on board. 

Yours obediently, 

Michael Tombazis. 


Mark read it and handed it back. 

“I suppose Miss Leven is helping him to pack,” he 
observed, with the slightest tinge of sarcasm. He dis¬ 
liked Nydia, but it is not in the nature of man to see 
a pretty woman making things pleasant for some one 
else without reflecting that, at the least, she shows 
poor taste. 

Stacy looked a little puzzled, but said nothing. It 
was not her way to criticize other women. She poured 
out Plummer’s tea and made some indifferent remark. 
She was still a little sore about the morning’s excur¬ 
sion, not knowing how Nydia had manoeuvred it, and 
she did not feel like talking. 

But no one could beat Mark at that game. He was 
capable of remaining silent for a week, in the midst of 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 135 


company, when he chose to do so. He chose to keep 
silent now, knowing that most women will break any 
silence if only it lasts long enough. He gave Stacy 
ten minutes, in his mind. 

Ten minutes is a very long time when you pass it 
slowly drinking tea and wondering who is going to 
speak next. Stacy thought she had been silent nearly 
twice that time when by and by she broke the stillness 
nervously with the very thing she had not meant to 
say. Yet the interval had been less than ten. 

“Captain Tombazis seems very much interested in 
Miss Leven.” She added, to herself alone: “You are 
a fool. You will make him think you are jealous!” 

Mark, holding a half-cold pannikin of tea thought¬ 
fully in his hand, replied: 

“Yes, I’m sorry to see he is!” 

Stacy flushed redly. 

“Why should he not be?” she asked. She knew per¬ 
fectly well that the world in general would consider 
Blazes a shocking match for Nydia, who passed for a 
gentlewoman, but she was not prepared to hear Mark 
Plummer make objections. 

Mark, as always, said the unexpected thing. He 
had no use for misunderstandings, and he saw that one 
was ripening fast. Coolly, he answered the thought 
in Stacy’s mind, instead of the words she had spoken. 

“Oh, but I don’t. . . . You’re quite wrong. I 

reckon you know that, if you’ll just stop to consider, 
I’m not going to say anything, either; you needn’t be 
afraid.” 

“I—I-” 

“Yes, you do. You have understood from the first. 
That’s enough. I want to go back to the question of 
Miss Leven. She doesn’t savvy Tombazis, and you’ll 



136 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


have to try and make her. No—” he seemed to catch 
and answer every thought in her mind—“I know she 
isn’t just a schoolgirl in such matters. But she doesn’t 
know men like Blazes. She thinks he’s funny. Scott, 
he’ll show some of us things that aren’t so dashed funny 
if Nydia doesn’t knock off on the game she’s playing. 
I don’t care if he gets up a fight—soon have it as not 
—but it might make things inconvenient on this island 
for you women.” 

Stacy wanted to answer, cattily, “Do you call her 
Nydia?” when she knew quite well that he did not. 
She repressed the impulse, and answered quietly: 

“I’m sorry you think there’s likely to be trouble. 
I’ll try and speak to Nydia, but I’m afraid she won’t 
take it very well.” 

“Thank you,” said Mark. Silence fell again; it 
was a different silence this time, and Stacy feared that 
Mark, not she, might be the first to break it. He was 
sitting opposite her, looking at her under heavily 
curved eyelids and twisting one end of his moustache 
in the fashion that always shows a man is thinking 
sentimentally. 

“With Charlie perhaps lying dead to-night,” thought 
Charlie’s wife, “what a brute I should be if I let him 
say a word!” It was in her mind, and she could not 
drive it out, that there would be freedom, and right, 
to say that word, some time soon. 

“I must go and see about the stores,” she said, rising. 

“I’ll help you,” said Mark. 

“Will you?” thought Stacy. “Well, if you do I’ll 
see you stick to business.” 

Down at the cook-house they found that the stores 
had already arrived and were lying in a great heap 
upon the grass. 


THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 137 


“What a hurry Captain Tombazis is in to get things 
ready!” said Stacy, lightly. “These would have done 
all right after supper.” She found her storebook and 
pencil, and began to tally the goods, Mark calling them 
out and handing them over to the boy who was storing 
them on the cook-house shelves. The work was tedious, 
as everything had been mixed up in transit, and they 
had to search for the complete tale of each item as it 
came along. 

“That’s all the corned beef, surely? No—here are 
two more tins. Bulipai, chuck him over there. One 
dozen tins. Silvertop tea—got that? Case of four 
dozen salmon. Got it? Twenty-five-pound tin of 
cabin biscuit, about quarter used. Another three tins 
of butter; don’t list that yet. Jam? Here it is.” 

They had lingered a good while over tea; by the 
time all the stores were collected, listed, checked, and 
put upon the shelves, it was growing dark. 

“Have to knock off now; anyhow, we’ve practically 
done,” said Mark, wiping his chin with a handkerchief 
—it was hot here behind the scrub, out of the breeze, 
and he had been doing a good deal of lifting. He pulled 
down his sleeves and looked at Stacy with an expres¬ 
sion of reproach. She had been treating him, so he 
said to himself, like a shop assistant. 

“Dear little devil,” he thought, “wouldn’t I like to 
pay you out! If you weren’t such a good little devil— 
but then you are, Stacy, love. . . .” Then, aloud: 

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Holliday? Oh, yes—it’s 
about time they were back. No, I shouldn’t think it 
would matter a bit if supper is late. Blazes will be 
busy with one thing and another, getting ready; he 
always was a bit of a fusser.” 

“Well, I couldn’t see to it before,” declared Stacy, 


138 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


rather uncomfortably—for she hated to fail in her 
housekeeper’s job, “this thing simply had to be done. 
I’ll take out a tin of sausages now, and mark it off. 
Sausage fritters won’t take long, and will be very-” 

She paused, with the tin in her hand. 

“I wonder, did I hear. . . . But I can’t have,” 

she said. 

Mark Plummer was turning up the flame of the 
hurricane lamp. “What did you hear?” he asked her. 

“It sounded like the engine of the boat.” 

“It couldn’t be—unless Blazes wants to get her a 
little farther out to lie till morning.” 

“That might be it, of course.” They stood silent, 
in the warm, scented dusk, listening hard. A vague 
disquiet was creeping over both though neither would 
have acknowledged it to the other. 

“It is the engine,” said Mark, in a minute. 

“Well, I suppose he does want to lie a little farther 
out.” 

“Yes. He’ll get away all the sooner to-morrow.” 
Mark listened, the lamp swinging in his hand and cast¬ 
ing strange shadows over Stacy’s face and his own; one 
would have thought they were grimacing at each other. 

“He’s going a long way,” Stacy ventured. 

Mark said nothing, but began to walk rapidly down 
toward the landing, Stacy following. In a minute they 
were through the trees; the coral sand gleamed white 
ahead of them; the lagoon showed clear and pale. Out 
toward the opening of the reef a head-light skimmed 
the clouds; a red lamp showed to the left of it, below, 
and a green lamp glimmered to the right. Even as 
they looked, the Kikenni made the passage, glided 
through the reef, and turned her head southward on 
the long run to Thursday Island. 



THE DEEP SEA AND THE DEVIL 139 


“Scott, he’s gone!” cried Mark. 

“And so has she!” 

“Gone—and left us!” 

They had. Stacy and Mark Plummer were alone 
on the island. 


CHAPTER X 


ALONE ON ORO 

T HE man and the woman, marooned on Oro, stood 
staringafterBlazes’s ship as she vanished through 
the growing dusk, a cloud among clouds. Not 
till the last gleam of her masthead light had disap¬ 
peared did they turn away from the sea that, instead 
of their highway, had become their prison wall. 

“What on earth has he done it for?” demanded 
Stacy, weakly. She felt almost stunned. 

Mark Plummer answered her in a voice that was 
full of anger. 

“It’s plain enough what he has done it for. He 
thought of nobody but himself—damn him!” 

“Why, they’ve run away together! I didn’t think 
Nydia-” 

“If you ask me, she’s had no say in the matter. But 
I’m not worrying about her. She can look after her¬ 
self. What gets me is the way the cow has behaved 
to you.” 

“Me?” 

“Yes,” said Plummer, biting off the word as though 
he could have said a good deal more. He turned 
away from her, and seemed to fix his eyes upon the reef- 
passage—dimly visible as a break in the glimmering 
foam—through which the lights of the Kikenni had so 
140 



ALONE ON ORO 


141 


lately waned away. But Stacy knew that he was not 
looking at the reef. 

He did not give her time to do much thinking on the 
matter. Almost instantly he turned round and began 
to talk, as if he wanted to keep her from following the 
course of his thoughts. 

“No use crying over spilled milk and sailed schooners, 
Mrs. Holliday. What about these sausage fritters 
you were promising? They sound very good to me.” 

Stacy, still feeling as if someone had recently thumped 
her on the back, or as if she had just had a sudden 
shower-bath, saw that it was necessary to pull herself 
together. 

“Why—why—yes,” she stammered, trying hard to 
smile. “Of course I’ll make them. You must be— 
you must be hungry.” 

“I’m dreadfully hungry,” emphasized Mark. “And 
so are you, if you only knew it. Don’t let’s worry an¬ 
other minute about those two idiots. Come on up to 
the cook-house, and I’ll beat up the batter for you; the 
boys got a new lot of scrub hen eggs this morning.” 

Stacy had never known Mark Plummer so talkative, 
so insistent, so full of wants and suggestions and ideas, 
as he was that evening. The sudden flash of white an¬ 
ger that she had witnessed seemed to her almost like a 
dream. Had she ever seen it at all, she wondered, as 
the evening passed by. Supper, a meal that seemed at 
the same time lonely and companionable, declining from 
bursts of conversation into odd silences full of reef- 
noises and wind-noises that no one had ever noticed be¬ 
fore, was over; the boys had cleared away and gone 
to their hut to devour the fragments remaining. 
Night, an unmistakable night, with stars and a rising 
moon, was here; and there was no Nydia to lounge in 


142 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


becoming attitudes under the light of the hanging 
lamp, no Tombazis to utter wild parodies of sea-oaths, 
and to sit cross-legged on the ground, netting an end¬ 
less fishing net, and telling stories of the seven seas and 
the seven-and-twenty nations of the earth. There was 
herself, Mark Plummer, and the desert island of Oro; 
no more. 

Up to the present Stacy had not troubled herself 
to think whether Mark Plummer, this man who should 
have been her man, and who had come too late, was 
clever or not. She knew that he was handsome, that 
he was strong, that his forty years lay very lightly on 
him; that his life had held adventure piled on adven¬ 
ture, till danger and hardship had lost significance for 
him, being almost the normal conditions of existence. 
She knew, beyond all, that he loved her. As to clever¬ 
ness—that was a thing of cities and society; it did not 
come into the question. 

But that night she was forced to witness, and to 
admire, an exhibition of character that ever after 
changed her opinion of the man. 

She knew, when she dared to think about it, that he 
was red-hot with rage against Tombazis for leaving 
her in such a compromising position. She knew that 
he must be feeling the awkwardness of it as much as, 
perhaps more than, herself. Further, she knew, 
through love’s unerring intuition, that the heart of the 
man was, this night, very warm toward her, very sore 
and rebellious against the fate that stretched icy hands 
between to keep them apart. But nevertheless, she 
saw him cool, gay, and amusing; ready to play a game 
of bridge, to find the novel she wanted, and look out 
one for himself, to sit beside the packing-case table 
smoking, and telling her the strange wild yarns of ad- 


ALONE ON ORO 


143 


venture on river, range, and island that are the half of 
conversation in New Guinea—all as she liked and chose. 
The hard man was flexible, the silent man was talkative, 
the wilderness tamer bent to the beck of her finger that 
night. And with all, through all, ran ever the silver 
thread of Mark Plummer’s unapproachable manner, 
the silken flow of his indescribable charm. What was 
it that made the man so loved throughout the land of 
Papua, Stacy wondered, even while she submitted to 
the soothing of her mind, as one of the wild horses that 
Mark was fond of breaking might have submitted to 
the soothing of his clever bridle hand. She could not 
tell. Nor can you who read this tell how it is that the 
one man or woman who comes into your mind as you 
read gathers honey of love from every barren bough, 
while others may starve in the midst of gardens of 
plenty. 

Whatever he was trying to do with Stacy’s mind that 
night she realized before long that he had done it. 
When the tired, waning moon had come up in the sky, 
and the cool of the night was coming, and out in the 
bush the Marconi-cricket that sleeps through the early 
hours of dark and wakes in the later was sending out 
the first long call to his mates in his curious Morse 
code, Stacy rose from her seat and gathered up her 
books and her cards. She told Mark that she was go¬ 
ing to bed, wished him good-night, and saw him go 
away to the cook-house to sleep as unembarrassedly as 
if they had been in the midst of a crowded city. Mark 
had said many things to her that night, but they had 
not been said in words. So much the more did they 
find a sure home in her mind. For Mark Plummer, as 
she now realized more clearly than ever, was one of the 
rare characters who in all important matters speak by 


144 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


deeds, not words. Mark did not say things: he did 
them. He did not disclaim things, he left them alone. 

Nevertheless, she lay sleepless much of that night. 
And as she turned about on her narrow bed she kept 
saying to herself, whispering in the dark: 

And joy was duty, and love was law. 

And again, as the dawn came pink and cool beneath 
the eaves of the veranda : 

Then did I learn existence could be cherished 
Strengthened and fed, without the aid of joy. 

For in the sad hour that comes with breaking day she 
knew that kindly death would never set her free. 
Charlie would live. 

She did not grudge him life—but oh, if only—if 
only . . .! 


In Papua, hide what you like and can from your 
nearest and dearest ones; from your husband, your 
child, your old and trusted friend—but never think to 
hide from your cooky-boy. For you will not do it. 

Stacy’s cooky had been sleeping out of doors be¬ 
cause the night was warm, and also because, native- 
wise, he was filled with curiosity. In the morning he 
brought her her cup of tea, and as she sat on the edge 
of the bed to drink it, he volunteered, fussing about 
with hot water: 

“Taubada [the chief], him seep bee-hind you house.” 
“What?” 

“Mfgh!” with an indescribable grunt. “Him seep 


ALONE ON ORO 


145 


altogether night time, him havem levolber [revolver]. 
Him look out good along you.” 

“Hurry up and get the breakfast,” ordered Stacy, 
remembering the wise Papuan rule, “Never gossip with 
your boys.” 

But she had heard enough. She knew now that 
Mark, who had apparently gone off to the cook-house 
to sleep, was in reality all night long lying upon the 
ground behind the little palm-leaf house, keeping safe 
guard over her as she slept. She knew that he must 
have slept too; he was too sensible to wear out the 
strength that might be needed at any moment by use¬ 
less watching. But it would have been the hair-trigger 
sleep of the Papuan bush that leaps to instant wake¬ 
fulness at the slightest sound—at no sound at all—if 
some indescribable stir or thrill in the air warns the 
sleeper. He had told her how, in the old days, they 
used to sleep upon the terrible Yodda gold-field, where 
so many white men had been massacred by the natives. 
In those days, miners rested lying on the back, hands 
clasped on the breast over a revolver that was cocked 
and loaded with dum-dum cartridges. . . . 

Sleep like this had probably been his last night; 
would probably be, until Tombazis and the schooner 
returned from their ill-omened expedition to Thursday 
Island—with or without Nydia. 


“When do you think they’ll be back?” was Stacy’s 
first greeting to Mark. 

Mark was coming up from the beach, where he had 
been for his morning swim. He was trimly dressed 
in a white shirt and trousers with a smart blue tie 
dangling from his collar. The men had emancipated 


146 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


themselves from ties and from white drill early in the 
trip, and Stacy could not help but notice Mark’s re¬ 
version to the clothing of Port Moresby. But she put 
it down, determinedly, to a shortage of something or 
other, a deficiency on the part of the boy charged with 
washing—anything but what she knew it really was, a 
desire to look well before her. 

Stacy herself had resisted the temptation to do her 
hair in an elaborate and becoming way given up as un¬ 
suitable to camping life. She had, however, found it 
necessary to wear blue—blue was her colour simply and 
solely because she hadn’t another thing that would 
do. . . . 

Standing there before the palm-leaf hut, with the 
trade wind whipping colour into her tropic-pale face 
and fluttering her flower-like dress, with the curve of 
the coral sands and the blue breast of the bay behind 
her, she was the very picture of the fair lonely women 
that all men dream of meeting on a lonely isle. Dreams 
are not only dreams; they have reality somewhere. 
But in the reality there is almost always a flaw, a bit¬ 
ter drop. To be alone with the woman you love (for 
surely a couple of Papuan cook-boys count as nobody) 
on an exquisite, remote coral island—to see that she 
is very fair, and know that she loves you, and that the 
world is so far away as to be non-existent—this should 
be Paradise. Yet to Mark Plummer that morning it 
was something nearer hell. 

Like David Copperfield and all other heroes of love 
affairs he had found some comfort in putting on his 
best clothes and so feeling himself a shade more de¬ 
serving of his lady. He laughed a little at himself, 
grimly. It seemed to him he was likely to want all the 
comfort he could get. 


ALONE ON ORO 


147 


But he would not have exchanged the blessed pain of 
being alone on Oro sands with her for any happiness 
that the world could hold—save one. 

He answered her inquiry with— 

“No knowing. Maybe a week, maybe more.” 

The cheerful commonplaceness that he had put on 
like a garment was in his voice as he spoke. 

“What on earth do you think made her do such a 
thing ?” 

“Blazes did.” 

“Yes, I know, but how?” 

“If you ask me, I reckon there wasn’t any how. He 
just up anchored and went. I told you there was go¬ 
ing to be trouble.” 

“It seems as if there has been nothing but trouble 
ever since we landed.” 

“Oh, something always does go badly w T rong on an 
expedition of any kind. It’s part of the game. Lucky 
it was no worse. Not a circumstance to things I’ve 
known make hay of trips I’ve been on before.” 

“What could be worse?” 

“What happened on the Yodda some years ago was 
worse.” 

“What was it?” 

“We found two of our mates had been captured by 
the natives and roasted alive on sticks. They’d had 
fun with them before they roasted them, too.” 

“Oh!” cried Stacy. “Oh, how awful! What did 
you do?” 

Mark Plummer looked at her and did not answer, 
but she saw the blue-gray open eyes that she had 
thought lovely as a woman’s suddenly narrow and turn 
hard as flint. Out of them looked, in that instant, the 
tameless spirit of the wilderness; the lightning flash 


148 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


of stark masculinity that dazzles a woman’s soul and 
makes it cower away. 

Stacy asked no more. 

“It would be marrying a panther for all his gentle¬ 
ness,” was her thought. “Some woman will know that. 
I hope to heaven it won’t be— her. I could stand any 
other!” 

She wrenched the conversation back again. 

“I suppose you’ll have to wait for the diving gear?” 

“No. We can do a good bit of hunting before it 
comes to that. Of course the gear will be wanted. 
But you and I can begin.” He was pulling something 
out of his pocket; she saw, with some astonishment, 
that it was a pearl-shell. “You see, I reckon this was 
a sort of memorandum of the old Jap’s; a fellow could 
very easily forget, in a place like this, just where he’d 
stowed his stuff away, and a shell would be a lot handier 
than paper—where’d he get paper out here? So I 
reckon he made his mark on this.” He handed it over 
to her; Stacy studied, with interest, the line of dots 
and the rude sketch of a fish. 

“That’s meant for an octopus?” she asked. 

“Yes. May have been a memorandum of the island, 
since it’s certainly a favourite haunt of the brutes, or 
may have been something else.” 

“What?” 

“We have to find out.” 

He was sitting on one of the rough benches beside 
her while the boys brought in tea and biscuits and a 
dish of fried bacon, smelling savoury as only bacon 
cooked in camp does smell. He looked very friendly 
and brotherly, and Stacy, if she had not loved him, 
would have thought, without thinking much, that 
friendliness and brotherliness were all that was in his 


ALONE ON ORO 149 

mind. But she did love him, and she was not de¬ 
ceived. 

“He is putting all that on, to make me feel at ease,” 
she thought. “The poor thing’s heart is just break¬ 
ing, and it’s just got to break. This is a hateful world 
—I wish we were comfortably dead together. 

His eyes look as if there were lamps behind them, and 
when he stops all that chatter *he drags his moustache 
out by the roots. Oh, Mark, Mark! don’t care—don’t 
care for me! . . . (Shall I give you two pieces of 

bacon? . . . No sugar, thanks.) We sit here 

looking at each other and eating and drinking as if we 
didn’t care, and all the time-” 

She had finished her breakfast; she had taken the 
shell from Mark, and was turning it about mechanically 
in her hands. She was not thinking much about the 
shell; what she wanted was something to occupy her 
eyes and keep her from looking too often into those 
tired, splendid eyes above her. But Mark misunder¬ 
stood. 

“I reckon you’re beginning to see what I saw in 
that,” he observed, taking the pearl-shell into his own 
hands, and laying a finger on the mysterious row of 
dots. 

“What?” asked Stacy. Then she added, with a 
thornprick of jealousy, “Does Nydia know what it 
is?” 

“No. Do you?” 

“I thought it meant, perhaps, the place he hid the 
shell.” 

“Perhaps it does—and again, perhaps it doesn’t. It 
might mean something entirely different. That’s the 
trouble.” 

“The trouble?” 



150 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“It wouldn’t be a good thing—from some points of 
view.” 

“Oh?” She felt that they were coming near the 
heart of the mystery—the thing, whatever it might be, 
that he had been keeping back so far. She judged 
Mark to be a man who would always keep something 
back, in every relation of life. He was a born hoarder 
of secrets. 

She saw now that he did not want to go further, buE 
that it w r as not impossible he might be made to do so— 
by her. 

“Won’t you tell me?” she asked, looking straight at 
him with her gay-sad brown eyes. 

“I like your eyes,” started Mark, much as he might 
have said that it was a fine day. “Do you know why ? 
Because you’re the only good-looking woman I know 
who doesn’t squint at a fellow sideways. They get it 
out of the corset advertisements, I judge. The girl in 
the corset advertisements is always squinting out of the 
corners of her eyes. I don’t know why, except that 
it’s fashion, and a dashed silly fashion at that. I re¬ 
member when I was just old enough to sit up and take 
notice of the girls the fashion was to look down and 
then look up again, and that was very pretty.” 

Stacy looked down without looking up again. She 
knew that her artillery had not failed, but the fortress 
was slow about capitulating. “Please, please,” was 
what she said, very softly. Mark pretended not to 
hear, but his face grew a shade brighter in colour. 

“By the way,” he said, with one of his sudden darts 
of intuition, “I wanted to ask you something. What 
was it you picked up the other afternoon when you 
were walking on the beach and put on your neck 
chain?” 


ALONE ON ORO 


151 


Stacy’s hand jumped to the thin gold chain that 
hung inside her dress. So he had seen that! Well, 
he should not know just yet. How could she tell him? 
The thing that dangled on the chain—that had re¬ 
placed a small gold pendant she sometimes wore—was 
a curiosity in its way: a bright coloured, heart-shaped 
pebble with a hole in it. She had a superstitious feel¬ 
ing about it. It was extraordinarily like a heart; she 
felt it was, somehow, lucky. . . . She meant to 
keep it and wear it, and if ever. . . . But there 

would never be any occasion for giving it to Mark 
Plummer; she was quite sure of that. So it must re¬ 
main there, hidden inside her dress. 

As for showing it to him—nothing in the world was 
more impossible. She could not tell how he had 
guessed it had to do with him in any way; but the mere 
fact of his guessing made her very sure she could never 
let him see it . . . unless. . . . There was 
no unless. 

“Very well,” said Plummer, pleasantly, rising to his 
feet. “We can begin our hunt.” 

“You won’t tell me?” 

“You won’t?” 

“There’s nothing to tell, Mr. Plummer.” 

“There’s nothing to tell, Mrs. Holliday.” 

It might have been funny, but it was not. Neither 
laughed. 

The first thing Stacy insisted on that morning was 
that she should be taken over the coral flat where the 
devilfish were. Nydia had told her about them, and 
she was anxious to see them for herself, and, incident¬ 
ally, to show Mark that whatever Nydia might be she, 
Stacy, was no coward. 

They had not long to wait for low tide, and as soon 


152 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


as the reef began to show up naked and glaring in the 
sun, Stacy was off, leading the way in front of Mark, 
who followed after her, his eternal pipe in one corner 
of his mouth, a smile, somewhat crooked by reason of 
the pipe, creasing the brown leather of his cheeks. He 
was beginning to enjoy himself, after all. What if 
everything in their two lives was more or less astray? 
—they had each other this royal, golden morning, and 
they had the whole island, which was as good as the 
whole world, to themselves. 

All by themselves—the thought was singing in his 
ears as he went. All by themselves—with Holliday in 
the sick-bay of a gunboat, God knows where; with 
Tombazis and the pestiferous Nydia scouring the Coral 
Sea in company; with only the silent, negligible black 
boys there to wait on them, and leave them all the time 
there was for enjoying each other’s company. Not 
so bad, was Mark Plummer’s verdict, but what could 
be worse. . . . He slung his pipe into the other 

corner of his mouth, and tramped with big strides be¬ 
hind Stacy’s pattering feet, not too much occupied to 
admire the prettiness of her ankles as she skipped from 
rock to rock. Yet he kept a sharp lookout in the 
pools they passed and well ahead also. He had recog¬ 
nized Oro by this time for one of the rare, risky spots 
called by the natives “Walk-about place belong oo- 
neeka,” where the horrible octopus grows to great size, 
and becomes, for some unknown reason, especially dar¬ 
ing. Mark was familiar with the term, but he had not 
before come across one of the “walk-about places” him¬ 
self. All the more was he inclined to be careful, re¬ 
membering the facts, known to many Western Pacific 
folk, that the alligator and the octopus alike cannot 
be relied on. With either you may run risks cheer- 


ALONE ON ORO 


153 


fully for ten years and in the eleventh meet destruc¬ 
tion in some way so simple that you never thought of 
providing against it. 

The “ooneeka” gave another proof of his unrelia¬ 
bility that morning. Not one was to be seen anywhere. 
The reef lay bare to the sun, pools, channels, pot-holes, 
showing blindingly bright, wide areas of cream- 
coloured sponge and brush formation boiling with life 
ugly, life beautiful, life curious and even laughable. 
But not a single giant spider showed itself far off, 
looping along among the pools; not a black and white 
eye, or a snake-gray, spotted arm, stirred in the deep 
channels that cut the reef. The “ooneekas” were not 
at home. 

They went to the verge of the coral wall, and, with 
the water washing almost on their feet, looked over into 
the blue and silver depths beyond. Mark showed Stacy 
where the fragments of skull had been found. 

“It was stuck in a bunch of seaweed,” he said. “I 
reckon the beauty that lives down there got the Malay 
as he was making off and scoffed him. Or maybe just 
drowned him, and the sharks got the rest. But he 
must have had some reason for messing about in that 
place.” 

“You think the shell may be hidden somewhere 
near?” asked Stacy, drawing back a little from the dan¬ 
gerous verge. It made her sick to think that Mark 
had actually gone down into those waters, braving the 
very arms of the monster that lurked below. It made 
her a little sorry, too—sorry for that mythical yet 
always-to-be-remembered woman whom Mark was go¬ 
ing to marry some day or other, and who would have 
to suffer many a heartbreak because of his cold, de¬ 
termined rashness in the face of many risks. » . , 


154 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


It was a strange world wherein not even the happy 
creature who was to be Mark’s wife would be altogether 
blessed. . . . Better not think too much of that, 

or anything. Action was safer than thought. 

“What are we going to do to-day?” she asked, kick¬ 
ing with the toe of her trim boot at a coral porcupine 
tipped emerald green that grew at the edge of the roof. 

Mark stood still for a moment before replying. The 
little isle of Oro that golden forenoon was full of the 
charm, elusive, heart-holding, that you used to find 
(you remember) in ways and places strangely varied 
when you and the days were young. You thought no 
one ever had hatched such odd chickens of ideas in a 
boyish or girlish heart—you were sure people would 
have laughed to know them. They could not have be¬ 
lieved that in the heave of glittering seaweeds at full 
tide the beckoning of a stream as it turned under a 
dark archway, the far-off rattle of carts on dry white 
roads—in these and in a hundred other sun-steeped, 
shadow-charmed spells of the open world there lay 
power to shake your heart to the very roots. 

There was no name for these things. And you 
thought that things without names must be, to most 
people, things negligible. You have learned better 
now. 

But you do not know—unless you are one of those 
who have been to the world’s far end and looked right 
over its edge—how deep the draughts are, how sweet 
the cup, of this same nameless enchantment in the 
lands where man is not. 

It is too sweet. No man can drink it long and re¬ 
main as other men. You of the lonely island, you who 
walk down to coral sands at sunset, to see a white sun 
die in an empty sea—you who wake at night in the 


ALONE ON ORO 


155 


enormous loneliness of a primeval forest to hear the 
ghost-pigeon calling through the dark—you who come 
back to yourself, yourself only, in the brown sago hut 
at the end of the long day’s trail—do you not know? 
. . . Are you as others, you who read this tat¬ 

tered page by the light of the hurricane lamp on the 
matted floor? 

Mark Plummer knew. On the Yodda trails, in lonely 
camps of the Gira, in the heart of the black Lakekamu 
valleys, he had learned what the wilderness is and does. 
He knew the sapping of will, the growing numbness, the 
coming of the long, long dream. Alone, it was one 
thing—he had slipped somewhat on those hidden ways 
himself, and recovered, not much the worse. But with 
Stacy it was another. Yes, by God! There should 
be no sweet poison draught in this world’s end place 
for her. 

He answered her in a minute, turning back from the 
sea. 

“Why, I reckon we’ve got to work at something to 
keep us from getting rusty all over, inside and out. 
No knowing how long we may be left by that crazy 
pair. Now, I should propose that we get a stick 
apiece and try every solitary pool on this reef for shell 
stored away. We’ll have to work together; it 
wouldn’t be quite safe for you to go poking about 
alone. But if we each take an end of the big 
pools it’ll go a lot faster than if only one were at it. 
To-day, and for a day or two more, we’ll be able to 
walk on the dry reef, but after that, the tide alters, 
and we’ll have to put on old shoes and wade.” 

They got the sticks and set to work. The sun 
blazed down on them and dazzled up from the water; 
there seemed to be thousands of pools and miles of 


156 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


coral reef. Plummer marked out the ground by plac¬ 
ing a paper flag on a stick, at a point on the sand op¬ 
posite where they began. It was discouraging to see 
how near the flag still was after an hour and a half of 
hard work. They had scraped their sticks through 
countless deep, suggestive cracks, poked under num¬ 
berless blocks of mushroom and brainstone coral, felt 
carefully with the tips of the long poles in wide cre¬ 
vasses where the dreaded “ooneeka” might be lurking. 
The tide was coming in now, bursting up over the reef 
wall as if it meant business, and sending fierce rushes 
up the sandy breaks in the coral. They could do no 
more that day. 

And not the ghost of a shell had either of them 
found. 

“Better luck next time,” said Mark cheerily, stick¬ 
ing his pole in the grasses behind the beach, ready for 
another day. There had been little conversation for 
the last hour or so, save— “Look out for that eel”— 
“Under the stone where the blue starfish is—no, not 
that one, the one as big as a dinner plate”—“Don’t 
poke the beche-de-mer, it will spit”—“Did you fall 
in?”—“Oh, what a lovely one! Would it smell as bad 
as the others did if I took it home?” 

Now, blowzed and damp, sunburned, hungry, they 
took their way back to the other side of the island, 
thinking of not much else than rest and food. Stacy’s 
mind, turned to practical things, went wandering pres¬ 
ently on the number of times that Mark Plummer had 
struggled with the New Guinea gold-fields, wrenching, 
with infinite effort, the precious dust from a soil that 
held fast and hid well. It came to her that this present 
quest must be one of immense importance to him. She 
knew him to be short of money—chiefly because, in a 


ALONE ON ORO 


157 


way slie was beginning to guess at, he had missed his 
chance of following the latest gold rush. Immediately 
the quest assumed greater importance to her. What 
was he going to do if it failed? 

“Have you looked over the middle of the island?” 
she asked. 

“Yes, of course I did that,” he answered her, striding 
along by her side. “But one walk was enough to show 
me there wasn’t a chance there. Just grassland, un¬ 
disturbed since Lord knows when, and a few bushes— 
I looked through them—and the bed of the stream.” 

“Did you look in that?” 

“Wasn’t necessary; I walked along the little ridge 
above and looked down, and there was no possible 
place.” 

“I walked all down the bed and looked,” confessed 
Stacy. “But I only came to the same conclusion as 
you did, without the trouble.” 

“That was where you picked it up,” remarked Plum¬ 
mer, with a teasing light in his eye. Stacy, crashing 
through the coral gravel, pretended not to hear. She 
wondered what he guessed. As a matter of fact, he 
guessed not much, and that very wide of the mark. 
Knowing that he had been over the ground of the 
stream-bed before her, though higher above, he thought 
he might have dropped some small thing such as a cuff- 
button, a safety-pin, a pencil, and he had some faint 
hope that she might have found and kept it. 

Stacy, thinking of the curious little shining heart 
that lay warm on her bosom, hugged her secret to her¬ 
self delightedly. Perhaps—perhaps—some day. . . . 

They went along the winding, lime-white beaches, 
among the low fringing scrub that was tangled through 
with fathoms on fathoms of red and green “mermaid’s 


158 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


hair”; wild jasmine and wild honeysuckle looking out 
at them with pale sweet faces that seemed to know; 
small, brilliant blue and golden honeybirds swinging 
upside down and twittering, careless of their presence. 
And the sands were empty, and the green lagoon was 
empty, and the blue, rainbow-marbled seas outside were 
bare of mast or sail. And they looked on it all, and 
saw that it was good. There was no pain in either of 
their hearts now. Some gentle, narcotizing balm had 
been laid on wounds that throbbed and burned. 
Dreams floated under Stacy’s long white eyelids; the 
hard-cut lines on Plummer’s brown cheek had suddenly 
grown softer. . . . 

. . . Fluent, somewhere, in the unbroken sun¬ 

shine that did not care, that did not shine for man, 
the unbodied Spirit of the Island may have laughed. 


CHAPTER XI 


THE TERROR OF THE REEF 

O N ORO ISLAND the days went pleasantly. 
After the first, Stacy ceased to trouble about 
Tombazis’s return. Mark Plummer had told 
her his opinion on that point. 

“He intends to be away every bit of three weeks,” 
was the gold-miner’s verdict. “Maybe more.” 

“How on earth do you know?” 

“Simple enough. He landed practically all the 
stores he could spare, apart from what he had to keep 
for the trip, and there’s enough to do three weeks lib¬ 
erally, and four with care. Blazes knows how to cal¬ 
culate stores as well as the next man. He may be tem¬ 
porarily off his head about this Nydia woman, but he’s 
not going to starve you or me on that account. No, 
we’re all right, provided nothing happens to him.” 

“If it did?” 

“Oh, Papua’s full of ifs. I don’t suppose anything 
will happen.” 

Stacy accepted the prophecy; she had been long 
enough in the country of strange chances by now to 
take things as they came. It was true that if any acci¬ 
dent occurred to the Kikenni , they would be in a bad 
way. But ships, as a rule, did complete their voyages, 
and she “felt it in her bones” that Tombazis and his 
schooner were not going to be an exception. Some- 
159 


160 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


thing primitive, ill-regulated, springing up in her secret 
mind, shouted unashamedly: “No such luck!” 

It was wonderful how the days slipped by. The 
Papuan cook-boys had discovered betel-nut palms, 
found the pepper leaf that goes with the famous island 
“chew,” and made themselves fresh lime from coral. 
Thus provided, they spent their days, when not actively 
engaged in cooking or washing, in one prolonged, deli¬ 
cious betel-nut orgy, lying underneath the big calo- 
phyllum trees that skirted the beach, half drugged, 
half dreaming, hour by hour. For all the notice they 
took of their white masters, when not actively driven 
to work, they might as well not have been there at all. 

Stacy and Mark Plummer had slipped into the com¬ 
panioned solitude of Oro as if it had been their life 
for years. One passing by the island, and making a 
hasty call, might well have supposed them to be a long 
married husband and wife save for the fact that they 
carefully addressed each other as “Mr. Plummer” and 
“Mrs. Holliday” when they used names at all, which 
was seldom—more seldom as the days went by. They 
had their established jokes, their “Do you remembers.” 
They had favourite walks for evenings and for morn¬ 
ings. Stacy mended Plummer’s clothes with her own 
when he would let her, which was not always, since he 
could darn and re-button quite as well as she. At times 
they were light-hearted as children, and played school¬ 
boy tricks on each other; again, a spirit of gloom would 
fall upon the island,dull as its rare gray rainy days,and 
Stacy and Mark would shun each other save where the 
routine of work or meals brought them into company— 
sitting and walking apart, reading alone, suffering, 
alone and miserable, all the twice-told sorrows of a 
pain that each knew the other to be bearing, too. 


THE TERROR OF THE REEF 


161 


And. day by day. Eke the tide receding from the 
coral reefs, leaving them bare to wind and sum the 
world and all its influences, prohibitions, customs, com¬ 
mands. seemed to recede from these two Eves, abandon¬ 
ing them to Nature and themselves. And the spirit of 
the island, daughter of Wilderness and World's End, 
lawless, lovely, with sweet Eps dripping poison, looked 
down on them and laughed. . . 

Mark, soon after the sudden departure of Tombazis, 
had set the boys to work budding a second palm-leaf 
hut for himself in which he could sleep sheltered from 
dews or rains, and at the same time keep watch over 
Stacy. He was not sure that they had done with noc¬ 
turnal visitors yet. though he thought it probable they 
had. Anyhow, he did not mean to take chances. 

The hut was close to hers. Stacy found him one 
evening carefully spreading out old newspapers on the 
ground, about both houses. 

“What on earth are you doing?” she asked, stopping 
beside him. 

Mark looked up at her. The slight deEcacy which 
had been noticeable in her face and her carriage when 
thev came to the island was gone, in these days. 
She held herself erect as a young palm; colour had 
come into the flower-pale cheeks; there were dimples 
about her mouth where no dimples had been, and soft 
new curves were showing in her figure. She was all 
glowing with health; and youth, that had seemed about 
to leave her. now sat upon her like a starry crown. 

“It*s the slackening of the chain that has done that,*’ 
thought Mark bitterly. “She’s free—for as long as 
that beggar keeps away. God, how she must have 
hated him to look like that now !” 

He did not regret his own years, forty told. When 


162 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Stacy was his, as he said to himself she should some 
day be, he would be better able to understand her and 
take care of her than a younger man. 

“She’s rare,” he thought to himself. “Rare, and 
fine. Loyal, and able to love. You don’t pick such 
women off every gooseberry bush, and it’s not the first 
man you meet who can treat them as they ought to be 
treated. Holliday . . . it’s like giving over a 

young thoroughbred mare, all full of fire and sensitive¬ 
ness as they are” (Mark Plummer loved and under¬ 
stood horses), “to a fellow who ties a plough on to her. 
He’s the plough. She’ll pull him along somehow, or 
break her heart, but her job ought to be cantering 
along on the grass with a rider who can feel her mouth 
at every stride. ... I beg your pardon?” 

“I was asking you what you meant to do with all 
that paper.” 

“Keep off burglars,” replied Mark, calmly, going on 
with his task. He was pegging the newspapers down 
on the ground so that they could not be blown away. 
He seemed particular about their disposal, folding 
them in heights and hollows, and leaving an edge or 
two loose. 

“What do you mean?” demanded Stacy, standing 
over him with her bronzed little hands folded behind her 
back and the new sparkle in her eyes that he liked to see 
there—knowing that he himself had called it forth. 

“I generally,” answered Mark, disposing a hillock of 
paper with care, “mean just what I say.” 

“How could that keep off anything?” 

“Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” observed Mark, pro- 
vokingly. 

“I don’t know why you can’t tell me. JVhat makes 
you so annoying?” 


THE TERROR OF THE REEF 


163 


“Why are fleas good for a dog?” 

“They aren’t.” 

“Oh, yes, sometimes they are. They keep him occu¬ 
pied, and prevent him from brooding too much on the 
fact that he is a dog.” 

“Are you calling me a dog?” 

“If I am, I’m calling myself a flea, aren’t I ?” 

“Well, you’re certainly quite irritating enough to be 
one.” 

“This conversation seems to be verging on coarse¬ 
ness,” observed Mark. He pegged down another sheet 
of paper. 

“I do like that!” 

“Shouldn’t have thought so—but you never really 
know any one till you run away with them to a desert 
island.” 

“We’re talking frightful nonsense. What is it really 
for, Mark?” She had got into the way of using his 
name just once in a while. “Every Tom, Dick, and 
Harry in New Guinea calls him Mark, and Marky, so 
why shouldn’t I?” she thought. 

Mark, who had been teasing her exactly for the rea¬ 
son he had given—to keep her from brooding—now sat 
up on his heels and answered seriously: 

“We can’t be entirely sure we have done with the 
Malay picnickers. That’s to catch them if they come.” 

“How can you catch them with newspapers?” 

“If you’re a good little girl you may see one of 
these nights—though I’d rather you didn’t.” And 
that was all he would tell her. 

“Give her something to think about, and she won’t 
worry her inside out about that damned fellow and 
whether he’s coming back,” thought Mark. 

But he was very much in earnest about the news- 


164 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


papers; he knew exactly how useful they would be. 
He knew that when they were well in place no one 
could approach the huts without making a noise that 
would waken any light sleeper as surely as a pistol 
shot. He went to bed well pleased with himself. 

About the ebb of night, when dawn was not yet on 
the way, he woke, certain that somebody was treading, 
very cautiously, over the spread newspapers. Lying 
quite still he listened. . . . There it was again— 

footsteps, light, stealthy, nearing the huts. 

Mark felt for the revolver on his belt, pulled it from 
its holster, and judging his distance, made a single 
leap from the bed through the doorway and out into 
the dense gloom beyond. It was too dark to see any¬ 
thing; the moon was due to rise very shortly, but had 
not yet come up, and the stars were clouded. The 
paper, he knew, would make a mark of him in the dark¬ 
ness. He drew back against the wall of Stacy’s hut 
and listened. There! the soft creeping footsteps, 
pausing, retreating. 

He could hear Stacy moving inside. He whispered 
through the woven palm leaves: “All right, back di¬ 
rectly,” and made a rush after the footsteps. Who¬ 
ever the fellow was, he had got over the newspapers 
quickly; he was rustling among the grass close at 
hand. 

Plummer, with the small cool breeze that presages 
the moonrise sweeping lightly against his cheek, went 
after the sound. He thought he knew whither it was 
making—for the bay of the reefs and pools. The rus¬ 
tling increased; the fellow went crashing through 
brushwood and reeds openly and boldly. He knew he 
couldn’t be seen, thought Plummer, angrily, following 
hard in the rear. 


THE TERROR OF THE REEF 


165 


Up came the moon, sailing suddenly into the sky 
from behind the low hill that occupied the middle of the 
island. The brushwood, the beach, the sea, showed 
more and more clearly, studies in ivory and gray. And 
in the midst of the sandy beach Mark saw his unwel¬ 
come visitor running—a great iguana fully six feet 
long. The giant lizard of Papua had scented the 
scrub-hen eggs stored away in a basket in Stacy’s 
house, ready for breakfast, and being, like all its tribe, 
passionately fond of eggs, it had attempted to make a 
stealthy entrance, and carry them off. In which it 
had acted without reckoning on Plummer’s newspapers. 

Plummer damned the beast heartily for the false 
alarm it had caused, and sent a shot after it, in re¬ 
venge. It faltered as if hit, but got away into the long 
grass where he did not think it was worth while to pur¬ 
sue the beast. “After all, it’s harmless,” he thought. 
“And now I am out and the moon’s up I’ll just have 
a look around in general.” 

He tramped over a good part of the island, return¬ 
ing in half an hour or so to find Stacy’s hut silent. 
“Are you asleep?” he whispered, as he came up to the 
huts, making some small noise among the newspapers. 
She did not answer, and he stepped away from her 
house cautiously, making as little noise as possible. It 
was well she had gone off to sleep again; evidently, she 
had guessed what the silly thing really was. . . . 

Mark had a small candle lantern in his hut. He lit 
the candle, in case of any other alarm, and set the lan¬ 
tern in the doorway of the hut, where it could throw no 
light inside, but would, instead, light up the form of 
any one approaching the place. This was a draughty 
situation; the little bit of candle began to waver and 
tremble. “It won’t keep in,” thought Mark, lying, 


166 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


half hypnotized by sleep, in his bunk, and watching the 
feeble flame. His eyes were open, but he was fast sink¬ 
ing into the peaceful slumber of the hardworked and 
healthy. He kept on looking at the little light. It 
wavered, sank, recovered. 

“Out, out, brief candle!” came into Mark Plum¬ 
mer’s mind from long-ago school readings. “Out, 
out, brief candle.” It was like a life. . . . 

Stacy—Stacy. . . . He was three quarters 

asleep now; the wavering candle wavered still more be¬ 
fore his uncertain eyes. Stacy—Stacy—dear girl. 
. . . Stacy would die some day. Perhaps some 

day soon. Life was so short, so unsure. 

“Out, out, brief-” 

Plummer sat suddenly upright, awake to the ends 
of his fingers. What was it that was beating upon his 
consciousness? What wave of thought was trying to 
make its way into his mind by the way of that darkly 
significant verse? There it came again—“Out, out, 
brief—candle-” 

He had no recollection a moment later of having 
got up, but he found himself, with his ear to the wall 
of Stacy’s hut, listening. There was no sound inside. 
“Are you there?” he asked. There was no answer. 

He seized the candle lantern, protecting it from 
draught with his hands, and went round to the door of 
Stacy’s hut. He held the light up and looked in. 
She was not there. 


Stacy had learned, like all Papuan folk, to take her 
regular quantity of quinine, with a little more when it 
seemed necessary. On the night when Mark Plummer 
spread the newspapers she had had ten grains; a cer- 




THE TERROR OF THE REEF 


167 


tain suggestion of chilliness, a slight irritability, seem¬ 
ing to threaten fever. The chilliness and uneasiness 
passed off with the action of the drug but it left her 
almost sleepless. 

For the early portion of the night she moved about, 
dozed a little, felt her quickly bounding pulse, and 
wondered when the quinine would let her sleep. By 
and by she began to feel more settled. She was just 
dozing off again, with a promise of sound sleep this 
time, when the crackling of the newspapers aroused 
her. Mark’s getting up, his hurried words through 
the wall, the sound of his footsteps going away, waked 
her thoroughly. The quinine was well in her head by 
this time; she felt half intoxicated and knew she would 
not sleep again that night. 

She got up, put on a few clothes and a pair of 
shoes, and sat down again to wait. 

There was no sound at first. The night had come 
to the dead point when all life trembles at the nadir 
of its swing; when the tongue of the sea lies lifeless on 
the shore and the winds hold their breath. It seems, in 
such hours, as if there never had been day; as if there 
never would be dawn again. . . . 

Stacy sat still and listened. The sound of Mark’s 
footsteps had long died away. There was a little stir 
now among the pattering palms; the moon-wind was 
rising. . . . Light. . . . Silver on the leaf- 

spears ; clouded steel on the sea. Why did he not 
come ? 

Across her mind, set running at twice its usual pace 
by the action of the drug, flitted a vision, dim, enor¬ 
mous, of all the women of the world, at home, in be- 
leagured cities, in houses, castles, churches, in lonely 
beds, on storm-swept wharves and beaches, under the 


168 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


palms, under the low-hung roofs beside the fires—all, 
all, asking of God and the hostile forces of the earth 
and sea one question—“Why does he not come?” 

As if in answer came the sound of a shot. She 
waited, heart and pulses racing. There was no further 
sound. She got up and went out. 

The moon was up now and the whole island lay 
clear. She hurried down the track that led to the bay 
where they had so often walked and waded over the 
reef. Stacy knew the reef now; it had few terrors for 
her. Even the horrible octopuses did not frighten her 
very badly. She had seen them several times, at close 
quarters, during the last week or two, and Mark, with 
what seemed to her superhuman courage, had attacked 
them quite coolly, planting his long spear right in the 
middle of the writhing tentacles, and showing her 
how he stabbed so that the creature was rendered 
helpless. 

“Don’t ever go out on the reef without your spear,” 
he cautioned her. She had brought it with her to¬ 
night ; she held it fast in her hand as she went—a long, 
light bamboo that Mark had pointed with a piece of 
iron heated and shaped in the fire. She did not expect 
to need it, however; the “ooneekas” had not been visi¬ 
ble of late—some caprice having withdrawn them 
from the neighbourhood of the shallow reef water. 
“You never can count on them,” Mark had said. 

There was no sign of Mark about the shore. The 
sea, waked up by the rising of the moon, was beginning 
to stir among the reef pools; she could hear it sucking 
and drawing; she could hear the shellfish in the pools 
making a loud poppling noise as the cool tide washed 
over them. Out at the reef edge foam was lifting and 
boiling with a hollow sound. There would be a storm 


THE TERROR OF THE REEF 


169 


at sea, somewhere, somewhen, to-night. Not here—the 
breeze was scarcely stirring; the blue and silver of the 
moonlight lay on Oro, wonderful, undimmed. Para¬ 
dise ! Paradise—but for the empty aching at her 
heart. 

Where was Mark? 

Trembling, half from the effects of the powerful 
drug she had taken and half from fear, she scanned 
the sand, the fringing grasses, the rocks. Was that a 
footmark? Yes—Plummer’s, undoubtedly, but there 
was nothing to tell her whether it had been made just 
now or many hours before, during the day. Still, it 
was a clue. And the footsteps—there were more of 
them, she could see now—pointed outward toward the 
water. 

She followed them. There was nothing to tell her 
the truth. Mark, just there, half an hour before, had 
stepped on a dead fish and soiled his shoes so badly 
that he thought the shortest way of cleaning them was 
to take a walk in the sea water, parallel with the beach. 
But to Stacy, the footsteps, leading down into the 
reef water, and not, apparently, returning, carried 
deadly significance. She was scarcely herself—she 
was exalted with fever and semi-stupefied by the ten 
grains of quinine that were singing and whirling in¬ 
side her little head—and it seemed to her quite plain 
that she must go out and rescue Mark. Where had he 
gone ? 

Her feet were in the lagoon as she stood staring 
seaward; the water felt pleasantly warm, as reef water 
does on a cool tropic night. What was that floating 
away beyond the reef, just where the foam began to 
break and tumble in? It bobbed with the tide; it 
lifted up something that resembled a head, dark against 


170 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


the “gold like unto glass” of the moon-path. Was it 
—could it be—Mark? 

One half of her mind, resisting the fever-poison and 
the drug-poison that fought with it, told her that it 
was not Mark’s dead body, that it was simply some¬ 
thing adrift and afloat beyond the reef. The other 
half insisted that it was Mark, and that if it was not, 
at all events, she must know. . . . How could she 

go back—go to sleep—with that vision stamped upon 
her sight? 

Grasping her octopus spear, she set her teeth, and 
waded out over the reef. 

It was not very shallow here to-night. There were 
places where she went suddenly down, up to the knees; 
places where slippery things darted out of holes and 
writhed past her legs, making her start and scream. 
In one beautiful, execrable coral garden full of pink 
and purple spears she fell right down and cut herself 
painfully. But she wiped the blood off, and went on. 
That thing outside the reef was still bobbing and bow¬ 
ing on the backs of the waves; whatever it was, she 
meant to—she must—have a closer look at it. 

The water deepened as she neared the reef. It was 
really not a night to have come out at all; the tide was 
too high. Stacy found herself up to the waist now and 
then; the long, easy swells that came in over the reef 
got her and tossed her about. She realized that she 
was practically bathing. It made her laugh. “Bath¬ 
ing for fever,” she said to herself. She was quite 
aware by now that the quinine had failed, somehow or 
other, and that she was in for a fever attack. The 
moon looked unnaturally, amazingly bright; the waves 
seemed full of sparkling eyes. . . . 

Was that a mushroom in front of her? Mushrooms; 


THE TERROR OF THE REEF 


171 


mushrooms—one gathered them in wet pastures, of a 
morning, when the sun was rising above the Queens¬ 
land hills. Stacy had stayed in Queensland. She re¬ 
membered the brilliant mornings in the bush—the green 
pasture land and the white mushrooms in it, rising 
above the grass as this great rounded thing rose out 
of the water. Of course she knew it was not a real 
mushroom. She was not going to pick it. One did 
not pi6k mushrooms as big as that. She was going to 
climb up on it—if this annoying swell would let her— 
and look at the dark thing that was tumbling about 
beyond the reef not twenty feet away. She could not 
go any farther now; it was almost deep water—the 
reef wall was quite near. . . . With the next swell 

—now, up! Hold fast! Done! 

She drew herself on to the great coral mushroom, 
balancing carefully, and stared about her. What a 
fool she had been! The dark body was nothing at all 
but the top of a palm tree, broken stumps of leaves 
looking like waving arms, the bud-sheath in the centre 
somewhat resembling a head. It was not Mark, of 
course, and of course nothing had happened to him, and 
certainly she was a fool for her pains. A violent fit of 
shivering took her; her head began to clear, and she 
felt indescribably cold. 

“Oh, I must go back at once,” she said to herself, 
hugging her arms round her body, and stamping her 
feet cautiously, the right foot first the left. 

Why, the left wouldn’t lift. 

What was the matter? Had she been struck with 
some kind of paralysis coming out like this in the mid¬ 
dle of the night into the sea water. 

She looked down at her foot. It was held. Some¬ 
thing had got round the ankle. A grayish, shiny 


172 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


thing, that swayed with the tide. A small pointed 
thing like an eel. It groped and felt. It crept higher 
up her leg, and seemed to grow thicker. In the 
moonlight it glistened revoltingly, a spotted, leprous 
gray. 

Stacy bent down to throw the creature off, her heart 
contracting with disgust and fright. She touched it, 
and in one awful moment she saw that it was no eel, 
no starfish, not even a detested, but still manageable, 
big “ooneeka” of the pools. The thin gray tip thick¬ 
ened, below her ankle, to a rope; beneath her foot it 
was a cable; it dragged downward, outward, swell¬ 
ing, in the swell of the water, to something as thick as 
a man’s thigh, studded, beneath, when it rolled in the 
moonlight, with sinister, gleaming discs; stretching 
twenty, thirty feet away, to the foamy verges of the 
reef. 

The giant octopus had got her. 


CHAPTER XII 


HELD FAST 

I T TOOK a moment for Stacy to realize the thing 
that had befallen her. Then, suddenly, she was 
blasted by the full knowledge of the truth. The 
useless spear fell from her hand—what help could it be 
against an enemy couching in unknown depths below 
the reef, thirty or forty feet away? She was done for. 
The thing was only feeling now—groping to find out 
what it was that, with its long spider-arms wavering 
about over the reef-edge in search of prey, it had 
caught. But in another moment it would begin the 
terrible, resistless drag with which even the smallest 
octopus can pull big weights under water. It would 
pull her—drag her—O God ! O God! 

She began to shriek, not with any hope of being 
heard, for she was quite certain now that Mark must 
have got back to the house, well out of earshot, but 
simply because she was mad with terror. She screamed, 
and prayed, screaming, and screamed again. The 
tentacle, cold, steely, crept farther up her leg. The 
suckers were getting hold now. They were like but¬ 
tons of fire burning into her flesh. The reef! The 
black depths beyond! The tossing skull among the 
weeds! Her skull—her body—torn—rolling fathoms 
deep. . . . No one would know. . . . She 

shrieked again—a cry that seemed to split her throat. 
173 


174 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


She beat at the hideous, living cable and tore it with 
her hands. It took another turn, and came higher. 
The moon was well up now, and very bright; in the 
transparent water she could see gigantic coils waver¬ 
ing, feeling, coming nearer. One of them lifted out a 
wet, glistening tip; it seemed to sense where she was; 
it turned, as if it had eyes, and slid toward her. Stacy 
was screaming with every breath now, and fighting 
madly. She knew that when the second coil seized 
her, she must go down. “Mark!” she shrieked, in the 
midst of her screams. Mark was asleep—away. 
. . . Oh, send him, God! “Mark, Mark!” 

A shout from the beach answered her; she heard 
splashing. Mark was in the water, and crossing the 
reef as it had never yet been crossed. She could not 
turn her head, but she called to him again. “The octo¬ 
pus—oh, quick!” 

He was alongside of her. He was striking at the 
coil that held her. The second coil came nearer— 
touched. The first began to pull. She staggered, 
and slid half off the coral rock. She kept on scream¬ 
ing—she could not help it. Mark had started to cut 
at the cable with his knife; it was as if one struck a 
dragging hawser of steel. He flung the knife away; 
she saw him snatch at his belt, and then the water 
closed over her, and she was down and drowning. 
There was a frightful concussion in her ears. The 
burning grip on her thigh loosened; something pulled 
her up into the air. Mark had got her round the 
waist, and was hauling her along like a sack of coals, 
anyhow, toward safety and the land. “Hurry,” he 
said. “Put down your feet if you can—that’s better. 
Yes, limp, walk any way you can. We’ve got to get 
out of this!” They were in shallow water; she was 


HELD FAST 


175 


stumbling up the shore, hampered a little by something 
that was hanging to her knee. Mark bent down to look 
at it; it was a foot of gray glistening tentacle shot to 
pieces at the thicker end. 

“There,” he said, as he loosened it slowly from her 
leg, and threw it away. 

“What did you do?” she stammered, through chat¬ 
tering teeth. She could not stand upright; he was 
supporting her with his arm. 

“Couldn’t cut him, so I put six bullets in, and shot 
the feeler all to bits. It took the lot. He was like— 
like—God knows what. Anyhow, I have you safe. 
My darling girl! Stacy—Stacy—if I’d lost you!” 

She knew, dimly, that he was kissing her, just as she 
was conscious of his arm holding her up from falling. 
It did not seem to matter at all. Nothing mattered. 
A cottony cloud seemed to envelop her mind. She 
saw the beach, the moonlight, the face so near her own 
—Mark’s dear, brown, handsome face, broken up, 
changed in some strange way—could it be possible?— 
yes, it was ; he had been almost crying! That did not 
seem to matter either, though yesterday it would have 
shaken the universe. She was only conscious of an in¬ 
tense, a shattering fatigue, and a bitter chill. 

“I—I’m cold,” she said, and reeled right into his 
arms. 

He carried her home. She did not lose conscious¬ 
ness; she felt his long, heavy steps upon the gravel, 
the panting of his breath, the slight tremor of the 
strong muscles that had been so sorely tried already 
that night, as the hut drew near. 

He stepped inside the doorway of her hut, where the 
little candle lamp was still burning, and laid her gently 
on her bed. She began to come back to herself. She 


176 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


was alive, she was safe, and Mark had done it. And 
Mark had—did she dream that he had kissed her? 

He was no dream now. He was back again in the 
hut, holding a tin cup with whisky in it to her lips, and 
making her drink. While the spirit was doing its 
work he foraged among her clothes, picked out dry 
things, and put them on the bed. 

“You’ll have to change at once,” he said. “Can you 
get into the things yourself, or shall I manage it for 
you?” He put the question so simply that she felt no 
embarrassment. 

“I can manage, thanks,” she said, and he left her. 
She crawled, somehow, into dry clothing, and lay back, 
exhausted. Mark was there in a little while, again, 
with a cup of something hot in his hand. 

“Bovril,” he said. “Drink it, and put down this 
quinine, too. What in heaven’s name possessed you?” 

She explained, briefly and confusedly. He seemed to 
understand—but did not Mark always understand? 

“You’ve cheated the fever,” he said, looking nar¬ 
rowly at her face. It was so. The threatening at¬ 
tack, as sometimes happens, had been driven off by the 
violent nervous shock she had received. But for a 
sense of breaking fatigue and a row of burning, aching 
spots on her leg, she had come off scatheless. 

“When Blazes comes back again,” said Mark, “we’ll 
do for that gray devil. Till then, I think we’ll give the 
treasure-hunt rest.” 

“When he comes back,” echoed Stacy. She was sit¬ 
ting up now; she felt almost strong. She flung back 
the heavy silky hair that had fallen down all over her 
white wrapper. Mark looked at her, and suddenly she 
remembered that he had kissed her. She could feel 
his lips on hers as if they were there yet; she could feel 


HELD FAST 


177 


herself, half unconscious, giving back his kisses, as she 
lay, newly torn from death, in his strong arms. And 
she felt, she who was Holliday’s wife, as if never in her 
life had any man kissed her before; because never be¬ 
fore, with her, had Love met Love. 

All this swept over her as the tide-waves swept 
across the reef, in the one moment when she sat with 
her hair about her, the dawn wind coming in through 
the door. Mark, standing very still, and looking— 
looking. How his eyes spoke, in the dim, mingled light 
of guttering candle and pale dawn! How the words 
that neither of them must say beat through the silence, 
into her brain! 

She got up and slipped to the door; leaned on the 
door-post, drinking in the wind. The light was grow¬ 
ing ; the air was like gray water; palms and drooping 
pandanus floated in it, dark as seaweeds. Over the 
reef and the lagoon there was the faintest touch of 
salmon-red. Soon it would be day—another lonely 
day, with Mark and Mark and Mark, and love and 
love, filling the little world. A tangle of thoughts tum¬ 
bled over one another in her mind. People talked of 
desert islands—“the sort of man you could safely live 
alone with on a desert island”—“I could go to a desert 
island with you. . . .” After all, people were gener¬ 

ally in the right, even stupid people who had never been 
to any college. People knew best. Things were truly 
different on a desert island. A world three or four 
miles round, and one person in it, filling it, overflow¬ 
ing it—that was what a desert island meant. And 
love—on such an island—was like those strong, clutch¬ 
ing tentacles that had held her last night. A giant 
force that clutched and held you; dragged you, maybe, 
down to the unknown deeps. 


178 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Mark came and stood beside her. They looked at 
the dawn. The salmon-red had brightened into fire of 
gold; the palms were growing green; out to sea, scream¬ 
ing, black on the gilded sky, as they looked, went a V- 
shaped flight of birds. Mark said not a word; but, 
like the woman in the sad old song, he dumbly “looked 
in her face, till her heart was like to break.” And 
Stacy realized that on her alone fell the weight of their 
two fates, two lives. 

“Even the best of men,” went her broken, tumbled 
thoughts, shaken, as it were, by the beating of her 
heart. “All really alike. ... It hangs on us— 
on us. To be so weak—and yet have to be so 

strong. . . . The stillest of them—if you throw 

the handkerchief!” 

Her feet had taken her out of the hut, she did not 
know how. She felt the sudden chill of the sands 
striking on bare soles. The day was up; the empty 
island, gold and green and blue, lay spread before them. 
It was their world, and they were alone in it, and they 
had told their love. 

There was scarce a day of Stacy’s life since then 
.when she had not asked herself questions—never to be 
answered. For as they stood there, alone as Eve and 
Adam in their Paradise, there came up, slowly, over the 
edge of the world, a little, pointing fingernail of white. 
It grew to a finger-tip, to a finger. It turned toward 
the reef of Oro Island. In the dawn wind, it sped. 

Plummer and Stacy spoke at the same moment. 

“Blazes!” 

“Tombazis and the boat!” 


CHAPTER XIII 


“once aboard the eugger” 

W HEN Nydia Leven, weeks before, had gone on 
board the anchored schooner, she had no 
thought of anything but a little amusement, of 
the sort that she called harmless. 

Tombazis’s jealousy of Mark had caused her a good 
deal of entertainment. It was so openly displayed. 
The big fellow, twisting his fierce moustache, had stood 
in opera-bass attitudes upon the beach and gloomed 
at Plummer until Nydia felt she could scream with 
malicious amusement. There had been one drop of 
bitter in the cup, however. She knew that Blazes was 
utterly mistaken: that the long afternoon she had spent 
with Mark was not specially enjoyed by him, and that 
her open praises of his courage, in diving down over 
the octopus’s den, annoyed him quite as much as they 
aggrieved Tombazis. 

Still- 

Nydia knew men; her greedy vanity never blinded 
her as to the value of the impressions she made upon 
any one of the capricious sex. She was frank with 
herself over Mark’s general indifference to her. But 
nevertheless she thought there had been some hopeful 
symptoms. They were not much to go upon; yet she 
fancied they might be encouraged. They were seeds, 
179 



180 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


feeble, perhaps, only to be cultivated by careful water¬ 
ing and tending. . . . 

Now the best way of watering any common type of 
fancy, as Nydia well knew, is to pour the warm tropic 
rain of jealousy upon it. If she could make Mark 
jealous of Tombazis, and if Holliday were back again, 
keeping Stacy away from any chance of talking or 
strolling with Mark Plummer (she knew who would 
see that he did it!) why, then, there would be what 
there scarcely was at present—a chance. 

Very well, then! 

Nydia went into the hut, powdered her face, car- 
mined her lips, and arranged her hair in the over¬ 
innocent, vaudeville actress style that was so fascinat¬ 
ing and at the same time so horribly warm for a 
tropic climate. . . . No matter. One had to 

suffer sometimes for one’s looks. 

She went down on the shore, as Tombazis was getting 
over the stern of his whaleboat, and asked him if he 
wouldn’t take her, too. 

“It is so hot here,” she complained. “And a breath 
of air, out near the reef, would be lovely.” 

Tombazis sprang ashore again at once, and offered 
her his hand. 

“I’ll give you a breath of air out by the reef, all 
right,” he declared. There was something suddenly 
alert and brisk in his demeanour; the alertness of a 
man who sees and who decides without long parley. 
Nydia might have remembered, had she not been quite 
so much occupied with the disposal of her silk stock¬ 
ings and lace petticoat, getting over the gunwale, that 
Tombazis, in Papua’s “old days,” of ten or fifteen 
yearsbefore,hadbeenknownas a sort of youthful under¬ 
study and successor to Bully Hayes, the Central Pacific 


“ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER” 181 


pirate. But she had taken the comic view of Tom- 
bazis from the first—he was so fat, and he stared so 
like a pug dog! One couldn’t think seriously of a big 
fat man who wore sashes and reminded you of people’s 
snarling pets. 

So she thought of nobody and nothing but herself, 
her stockings, her fancy for Mark Plummer, her chance 
of getting him, as she swung into Tombazis’s whale¬ 
boat, and went, driven by twelve muscular brown arms, 
fast across the lagoon to the anchored Kikeimi. She 
hardly looked at Blazes, there in the stern, with the 
tiller-ropes in his hands, and the red west, shot with 
the marvellous blues of a New Guinea sunset sky, out¬ 
lining his big, dark-hatted head. If she had seen the 
flame in the eyes of the “funny man,” of whom she pro¬ 
posed to make a tool, she might, even then, have found 
occasion to go back again to the shore. But the flar¬ 
ing lights of the west made him a mere silhouette; he 
seemed a nothing to her, a thing that steered the 
boat. 

The Kikenni, lying at anchor far out, swung lightly 
with the incoming tide; she broke, and made, and 
broke, white pictures of herself, deep in the green; she 
showed gold gleams of copper as she rolled. Thistle¬ 
shaped furry heads looked over her bulwarks. The 
Papuan crew were watching. No one can tell you 
what the Papuan thinks of his white masters—himself 
least of all—but it is certain that he understands 
them, at times, better even than they understand them¬ 
selves. 

At all events, the cooky-boy, leaning over, laughed. 

With the grand air of the theatre, Tombazis handed 
Nydia up on board. If you come to think of it, it is 
not an easy air to maintain when the sole means of ac- 


182 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


cess to a ship is a Jacob’s ladder dangling down her 
sides. But Tombazis, somehow, managed it. 

“Now you are on board the lugger,” he jested. 
“ ‘Once aboard the lugger’-” 

“I’m not quite so ignorant as that,” protested 
Nydia, prettily. 

“As what, my lady?” asked Tombazis. He had an 
odd way of making up titles for Nydia; a way that, on 
the whole, did not displease her, for all that she pre¬ 
tended not to notice it. 

“As—well, of course, as to think this is a lugger. 
She’s a schooner. I know.” 

“A schooner, under some circumstances, may be 
quite as good as a lugger, your ladyship.” Blazes 
was unusually quiet—for him. He had turned away 
from her; he was busying himself about the deck, order¬ 
ing the natives to this task and that in various Papuan 
tongues. He spoke to them quietly, almost absently. 
You would have supposed he was just talking to them, 
not minding very much what he said. One of the boys, 
an intelligent tall Kiwai in a bead necklace and blue 
trousers, went down into the little engine-room, and 
began doing things among the machinery. Three more 
went aloft; Nydia did not notice what they were do¬ 
ing—something away up among the sails. Another 
couple of them got hold of ropes, and began pulling; 
things went clicketing and rattling up the masts— 
Nydia didn’t know what; details of seamanship had no 
attractions for her. She supposed they were going 
about their usual evening tasks, whatever those might 
be. 

Tombazis was talking to the cooky now, in plain 
pidgin English. 

“This sinaba [lady] him wantem tea, plenty quick. 



“ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER” 


183 


You go get him, my beauty, or by-’n’-by I knock off 
blooming head belong you, pretty d-delightful quick. 
Kareharega! [Hurry.]” 

The cooky went. As he went, he sang; something 
native, loud, and triumphant. 

“Shut that!” cried Blazes, who seemed to under¬ 
stand. The cooky closed the galley door upon him¬ 
self. Inside, you could hear him buzzing like a bee. 
From the engine-room the trousered Kiwai engineer 
joined in. 

A vein stood out, suddenly, on Tombazis’s forehead, 
and he bit his moustache, but he said nothing further. 
He glanced at Nydia. She was posing very prettily 
on the main hatch, a cushion at her back. 

“Isn’t it pleasant here!” she said, looking out at the 
dusky blue of the sea. The reef was quite near; its 
ravelled line of white showed plain through the fall¬ 
ing twilight; its hypnotizing, unceasing call was not 
quite drowned by the growing noise on board. 

“I like the sound of the reef,” she added, senti¬ 
mentally. “It makes one think of ‘magic casements’ 
and ‘perilous seas,’ you know.” She was quite sure 
he did not; but it was part of her pleasure to haunt 
her superior refinement, like a flag, in the face of this 
great common man who loved her. 

Blazes saw what she was doing; it made him think 
her very clever, though not quite in the way she meant. 
The Greek side of his character appreciated the sly¬ 
ness of her pretence. “She knows, bless her,” was his 
silent comment. “She knows I don’t know all that 
guff, but she pretends beautifully. I like their little 
ways.” He added, aloud, “Perilous seas is right 
enough, my lady. I’ll have to shift our anchorage a 
bit. There’s too much current here for my liking. 


184 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Suppose we have our tea in the cabin; the delightful 
boys will be all over the beautiful place in another 
minute.” 

The cabin was small and hot, but the cooky had laid 
out a meal that kept Nydia’s attention fixed strictly to 
her plate. She was more than a little “gourmande”; 
Tombazis knew it, and had ransacked his stores for 
special Greek and Chinese sweetmeats, guava jelly from 
Fiji, curious, unique preservations of “palolo” from 
Samoa, and sea-slug soup from Thursday Island. 
Sending the boys on deck, he served her himself, not 
forgetting to keep his own plate filled. The two en¬ 
joyed what Nydia called a feast, and Tombazis, more 
crudely but more correctly, a “feed.” It had grown 
almost dark; the swinging lamp was alight, and shone 
on the white paint and tarnished gilding of the cabin, 
on the glass dishes and gay Oriental china, that decked 
the meal-table. Once and again Tombazis burst up 
the little companion-ladder on to the deck, shouted 
something in native, and returned, it seemed, almost be¬ 
fore one had had time to see that he was away. 

A sudden clattering and hissing broke out on deck. 
Nydia was no sailor, but she recognized the sound of 
the donkey engine. A vague uneasiness seized her. 
She paused, with a piece of preserved li-chi on her 
fork, and listened. 

Tombazis was undoing the lid of a tin of chocolates. 
He did not look at her. 

“Are you getting up anchor?” Nydia asked. 

“Yes, my beautiful lady. Didn’t I tell you?” 

“I didn’t know you meant now,” said Nydia, whose 
uneasiness was visibly on the increase. “I thought 
you meant to-morrow.” 

Tombazis pulled the lid off the box. “Oh, no, now,” 


“ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER” 


185 


he said carelessly. “Every one of these chocolates, my 
very dear lady,” he added, “has either pink or pale 
green cream inside it.” He bit one in two. “See,” 
he said, holding up the half that remained. “Green 
as a pea.” He ate it solemnly. 

Nydia liked green chocolates. She held out an 
eager hand, but at the same time half turned her head 
toward the companion. “They’re making an awful 
noise,” she remarked. 

A steady stamping sound had taken the place of the 
donkey engine’s clatter. The boys on deck were call¬ 
ing to one another. Blocks and tackle squeaked; bare, 
straining feet sounded on the planks. A boat was be¬ 
ing hauled on board. 

Nydia jumped to her feet. “How are you going 
to put me ashore?” she cried, sharply. 

Blazes, lolling opposite, looked at her with frank 
admiration. 

“In the whaleboat,” he said. 

“Where are you going to anchor?” 

“Some way out.” 

The floor of the cabin had begun to vibrate; the 
schooner leaned a little to one side. 

“Captain Tombazis,” declared Nydia, with dignity, 
“I think you’re forgetting yourself. I want to get 
back quite soon. Please tell me when you’re going to 
put me ashore.” 

“Oh, yes, my lady, I’ll tell you,” was Tombazis’s 
answer. “I’m going to put you ashore in the whale¬ 
boat—at Thursday Island.” 

In a single moment Nydia understood—as the child 
who has been playing with matches and gunpowder 
understands, when flame and thunder burst up in his 
face. 


186 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“What have I done!” was her thought. “How can 
I get out of this?” 

She sprang to her feet, natural and unaffected for 
once, scrambled up the companion-ladder with no 
thought of stockings, and ran on deck. Tombazis, 
couched upon the cabin lounge, and eating chocolates, 
made no move to detain her. Instead, he selected a 
large chocolate, bit it to see what colour it was, and 
finding it white, threw it over his shoulder. 

“I like them pink,” he said to himself, trying an¬ 
other. He cocked one eye at Nydia’s disappearing 
heels as he chewed. 

“ThankthegoodGod,”hesaid,piously,“that there are 
always nice women in the world, and nice things to eat.” 

Nydia, panting with rage and fright, was giving 
wild orders to the crew—any of them, all of them— 
insisting that a boat should be lowered at once, that 
the engine should be stopped, that the Kiwai A. B.’s 
should desist from their noisy, stamping job of haul¬ 
ing up the mainsail. . . . They may have under¬ 

stood her, and may not. In any case, they took no 
more notice of her than of the screaming gull that had 
just fluttered by on its way to join a fishing party be¬ 
yond the reef. 

She rushed down into the engine-room. The black, 
Jew-nosed engine-boy was leaning over the engine. 
Nydia knew something about oil engines; she scanned 
the Kikenni’s little motor with a sharp, understanding 
eye, and snatched at a lever. 

“Hold on, Missus!” shouted the engineer, fiercely, 
taking no gentle hold of her wrist. “Me crackem you 
damn head along spanner, all same damn egg, suppose 
you no leave go and clear out! By gorry, Missus, you 
puttem ship along leef [reef] !” 


“ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER” 


187 


Nydia “cleared out.” She wanted to cry, but felt 
there was no time just then. The Kikenni , when she 
got on deck again, was leaning lightly over, as the eve¬ 
ning wind took her. With engine and with sails 
she was making short work of the quarter mile of la¬ 
goon that still lay between her and the open sea. 
Nydia told herself, wildly, that there was hope so long 
as they were within the reef. Once outside- 

“Once on board the lugger , and the girl is mine!’’ 
rang in her ears. 

Dow r n below^ Tombazis still lounged on the sofa. He 
was smoking now; she could see the curl of blue com¬ 
ing up through the hatchway, and the ends of his huge 
white shoes, standing up erect like tombstones. His 
coolness and indifference were maddening to her. They 
showed such certainty. 

She bethought her of screaming. Why had she not 
done it at first? True, they were a long way off shore, 
but sound carried on water. She ran to the bulwarks, 
leant over, and let forth a shriek. ... It was not 
ended before Tombazis, with a lazy word to the boys, 
had set them shouting so loud as they hauled that 
even the stamping and the clattering of the noisy small 
engine were drowned. The Kihenni leaned, leaned far¬ 
ther. The breeze was catching her white wings. 
Tombazis poked a large red face, decorated with 
a cigar, through the hatch, and cocked one eye at 
the surrounding reefs. They were nearing the 
barrier. 

He stepped on deck, went over to the wheel, and 
waving the native quartermaster out of his way, be¬ 
gan to steer his ship through the narrow opening 



188 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


ahead. Cigar tucked away in one corner of his mouth, 
he sang, pleasantly and tunefully, as the schooner, 
under his masterly handling, made for the blue water 
outside, with a safety margin of inches only. 

“When you come to the end of a perfect day ” he 
sang. And Nydia, crouching, hands clenched and 
teeth set, the very picture of a Fury, on the hatch be¬ 
hind him, could cheerfully have scratched his face. 

She would have jumped at him and torn the wheel 
out of his grip, in the hope of wrecking the boat, if she 
had entertained the least hope of catching him un¬ 
awares. But Tombazis, if he had the laziness and 
luxuriousness of the cat in his disposition, possessed 
also the cat’s supreme quickness of action, and Nydia 
knew it. 

Therefore she possessed herself, and only said things 
behind her teeth that would have surprised Stacy if 
she could have heard them. Tombazis would not have 
been surprised. He knew a little about Nydia, and 
guessed a lot. 

In a minute or two the schooner, abandoning her 
graceful glide, began to bow and swing to the roll of 
open water. The snarling jaws of the reef foamed, 
disappointedly, behind. Dim green of the lagoon gave 
place to dim blue of the darkening, great Coral Sea. 
There was no going back; they were away. 

Tombazis, giving the wheel to his quartermaster for 
a minute, turned to Nydia, who still sat on the hatch, 
humped like an angry cat. 

“Well, my lady?” he said. 

Nydia eyed him furiously. She could have spat at 
him. 

“You and I,” said Blazes, pleasantly, “will have a 
little talk about things in general, and Thursday Is- 


“ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER” 


189 


land in particular, as soon as we get through these de¬ 
lightful reefs. Sorry I can’t talk to you to-night. 
I’ve got to stick to the wheel, or else your delightful 
body would be giving the sharks a beautiful meal be¬ 
fore morning, my lady, and I suppose your lovely 
soul would be sitting on the rock somewhere combing 
its hair, and singing to entice the darling sailors down. 
As you did in my Mediterranean, lady, ten thousand 
years ago. I saw you there then. I swear I did. I 
was the captain of a pirate galley, and you sat on 
the Rocks of the Sirens, and you were just what 
you are now, only you’d a long fish’s tail. And you 
combed your wonderful hair, my lady, and looked 
into your glass, and looked up again, and you saw 
me!” 

Nydia stared murderously. 

“But, my lady,” went on Tombazis (“How much of 
that Greek wine did he have after I left the cabin?” 
demanded Nydia of herself.) “But, my lady, I was¬ 
n’t the same as the other sailors and chieftains. You’d 
made them come to you—just remember it’s only ten 
thousand years. But I leaned out of the galley, and 
looked at you and your glass, and then I took you by 
your wonderful, wonderful hair-” 

He had taken a lock in his hand—a long lock that 
had broken loose from its pins. 

“Just as I take you now. And I led you to the best 

cabin in my ship—just like this-” He drew her 

gently along. “And I showed you in—so—and told 
you to stay there, with no one troubling you—oh, no 
one troubling you at all, my lady—with the key to 
lock, and yourself to take care of yourself, till I and 
my galley got to the next port. Do you remember 
what you said when we got to the next port?” 




190 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


He had shut the door now, and was looking in at 
her, red-faced, immense, through the circling port¬ 
hole frame. The boys had lighted the lamps; side- 
rays from the swinging deck lamp fell on his big, com¬ 
placent, yet formidable face. 

Nydia, standing trapped in the middle of the cabin, 
half her hair now down in a torrent of gold, stared 
fiercely at Tombazis, and spoke just three words. 
They were the words of the class to which she be¬ 
longed by ancestry; in that moment, atavistic instincts 
seized her. 

Blazes let out a tremendous laugh. 

“Oh, no, my beautiful lady, you didn’t tell me that, 
and I won’t go there,” he cackled. “I’ll go to the par¬ 
son, quite in the other direction.” He swung away, 
and singing gently—“Mother, Bring me to the Win¬ 
dow When the Stars Begin to Shine”—took the wheel 
in his hands again, apparently just in time to sheer the 
Kikenni away from a threatening welter of white foam 
toward which the native steersman seemed to be head¬ 
ing, unconcerned. But if you had ever sailed with 
Blazes, you were apt to understand that he and his 
quartermasters knew their business. 

All night, singing as before, he took the ship through 
a tangle of horseheads, atolls, broken reefs—visible, 
awash, under water—as no one but himself could have 
taken her, for Hunt, almost the last of Papua’s great 
coastal captains, had died the year before. There are 
those of Papua’s “old hands” who remember Hunt, and 
how he steered the Government steamer, in a Queens¬ 
land coast typhoon, right across the unbroken Great 
Barrier Reef of Australia—Heaven and Hunt alone 
knew how. Hunt and Tombazis were men; they have 
left few successors. 


“ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER” 


191 


Alone, the hot fit of her fury being over, Nydia 
passed by degrees into the cold fit. Prudence, wili¬ 
ness, determination, came to aid her. Sitting on her 
bunk, chin in hand, she looked through her port hole 
at the silver-veined sable of the dark night sea and 
thought the situation out. 

“I can manage him,” was the substance of her think¬ 
ing. “I must manage him—and fool him. If he 
thinks I’ll marry him when we get to T. I., he’ll be all 
right. Very well, then!” 

She got off the bunk, removed her white dress, hung 
it up carefully so as to preserve the folds uncreased, 
withdrew a tortoise-shell comb from her head, and 
“did” her hair with it, found soap, found a blanket for 
the bunk, made her toilet as carefully as she could, and 
went to bed. Nydia had a marvellous power of sleep¬ 
ing. Not Blazes’s daring abduction of herself, not her 
own fit of fury, not even the heavy supper she had 
eaten, in company with her abductor, an hour or two 
before, kept her from resting undisturbed. All night, 
Blazes, comfortably unclad in pajamas and bare feet, 
stood at the wheel, and sang, with short intervals for 
a rest and a cigar, when the seas were comparatively 
clear. All night the Kikenni, ghost-like, tall, leaned 
over to the favouring southeast wind, and ran; her en¬ 
gine, because of the reefs, keeping up a steady clank 
below. All night Nydia, in the upper berth of the 
guest cabin, slept, with her hair plaited tidily, her 
mouth open and snoring, the last words of her nightly 
prayer—“I hope to God I haven’t burned my complex¬ 
ion”—lingering on her lips. 

Neither of the two thought of that other pair whom 
they had left behind on Oro. They were not given 
overmuch to considering any one but themselves. 


192 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


By nine o’clock next morning the ship was through 
the reefs. Breakfast had been served to Tombazis in 
the main cabin, to Nydia in her own. The love-smitten 
sailor had searched the lazarette to find new dainties, 
and had not been at all backward in helping himself to 
the varied stores brought on board by Holliday. The 
breakfast tray that went in to the deck cabin would 
have softened Nydia’s heart, if anything would. She 
enjoyed her food, however, without any relenting 
toward its provider. “It’s the least he can do,” was in 
her mind. Nydia always thought that what people did 
for her was the least they could have done. . 

After breakfast she dressed as carefully as she 
could, hardened her heart, and went to meet Tombazis 
on deck. 

Papua was out of sight; they were running south as 
fast as the breeze and the engine together could take 
them. The sea was a pleasant blue chipped over with 
foam. In the distance one or two small islets showed, 
the colour of dog-violets. Nydia knew by their size 
that the schooner was still far out; no chance of speak¬ 
ing ships to-day. When one got in toward Prince of 
Wales and Horn. . . . 

Tombazis was lying on the main hatch, comfortably 
dozing in the midst of a pile of cushions. He wakened, 
as instantaneously as a dog, when Nydia came out. 

“A very good-morning, my lady,” he said, getting 
up with one of his theatrical bows. “So you’ve come 
out to have a talk.” He placed a couple of cushions 
for her. “And what have you got to say to poor old 
Blazes now?” 

Nydia scanned him from head to foot. The impu¬ 
dence of him! Common merchant captain that he was, 
aspiring to her, daughter of a professional man, and 


“ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER” 193 


friend of an English gentlewoman of “good old fam¬ 
ily” like Stacy Holliday! The wickedness of him, dar¬ 
ing to carry her off in his hateful ship and cause talk 
about her. . . . People would not forget such an 

escapade. Nydia, a very self-conscious and self-valu¬ 
ing virgin, assessed the loss to her spotless dignity at 
its full price, perhaps somewhat more. Tombazis had 
lowered her in the market. The Hebrew strain in her 
was furious with him for that. 

But one must dissemble. . . . 

“What do you want me to say?” she parried, swing¬ 
ing the toe of her high-heeled slipper along the edge of 
the hatch-cover. 

Blazes lit up. 

“I want you to say,” he answered, words tumbling 
over each other, “first of all, that you’ll never have 
anything to do with that—that—with that d—that de¬ 
lightful ruffian, Plummer. I can’t stand seeing him 
walk about with you—I couldn’t, that is—and making 
love to you every minute my back was turned. Aha! 
Aha ! He won’t make love to you to-day.” 

Nydia felt suddenly softened toward Tombazis. It 
really was nice of him to think that Mark had been 
making love to her. “I only wish he had,” she sighed 
to herself. Her vanity would not allow her to make 
any disclaimer, however. 

“You haven’t any right to ask such a thing,” she 
said, somewhat less sharply. 

Tombazis put his fat hands together. Nydia 
thought he looked more than ever like a pug—a pug 
begging for biscuits. 

“You must remember,” he told her, “what you said 
to me ten thousand years ago, when you were a siren 
lady haunting the seas. ... Oh, you wonder how 


194 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


I know so much?” It was true; she had been wonder¬ 
ing. “We sailors of the Mediterranean haven’t forgot¬ 
ten all the old stories; we don’t have to learn them 
again. Sure we don’t, asthore! Well, when you were 
one of those siren ladies, you said to me that you’d 
come aboard my lugger—I think it must have been a 
lugger—and you said you’d stay with me for ever and 
ever. You remember that, don’t you?” 

“No, I don’t,” snapped Nydia, and then, recalling 
the necessity for dissembling: “At least, I can’t be 
sure. Perhaps I’ll remember by and by.” 

“You will remember just when we step ashore on the 
jetty of Thursday Island,” prophesied Blazes. “And 
that will be the day after to-morrow, for she’s got a 
slant that’s making her show her heels. I know you’ll 
remember then.” 

i “How do you know?” parried Nydia. 

“I’ll tell you how I know, lady of my heart,” an¬ 
swered Blazes, looking more than ever like a staring 
pug. “I know, because Charlie Holliday was mighty 
badly hurt, and I wouldn’t take ten to one on his re¬ 
covery. Put that in your beautiful pipe, my darling, 
and smoke it.” 

Nydia jumped to her feet and looked at him as if 
she could have stabbed him. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” she cried, in a high 
angry voice. 

“You do, my lady. Plummer has been making love 
to you—didn’t I see it with my own eyes? But I’ve 
taken you out of the way, and a man on a desert island 
alone with a nice lady like Mrs. Holliday is bound to 
start making love to her. Smoke that, too, Lady Goldi¬ 
locks. And if the lady’s husband is dead, very dead 
indeed-” 



“ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER” 


195 


“He’s not dead. I won’t believe it. The surgeon 
was going to operate, and make him all right!” 

Tombazis contrived—how, one cannot say—to shrug 
his shoulders lying down. 

“I’ve seen many a stabbed man,” he muttered, gently. 
“Some got well, and some didn’t. Now I think when 
we get ashore at T. I., we’ll have news of him, and it 
will be—D, E, A, D, dead—my lady.” 


CHAPTER XIV 


THURSDAY ISLAND 

B UT when they got ashore at Thursday Island 
there was no news at all. 

They sighted the bright red roofs and bright 
green hills of “T. I.” early in the forenoon of the third 
day. Tombazis took the Kikenni boldly in through the 
reefs that have picked the bones of so many brave ships 
in their time, and brought up in the anchorage, waiting 
for the quarantine officer. Tombazis had to wait some 
while; Thursday is, above all others, the island of “no 
hurry,” and it does not, in any case, think very much 
of the needs and wishes of little auxiliary schooners. 
Great Japanese and Chinese liners with crazy names, 
big Dutch boats that are the last word in luxury and 
comfort, Australian steamers manned by mutinous 
crews, Borneo boats, Singapore boats, Philippine 
boats, and more, run through T. I. as through a Clap- 
ham Junction of the seas. Squatted on the tip of 
Australia, Thursday Island, that once was, and now is 
not, a little Queen of the Seas, peers out through bleary 
aging eyes at the proud steamers as they trample by; 
chews over and over the cud of long past glories. 
. . . Drink- and opium-sodden, strangely perfumed 

with the hot reek of sandalwood, she sits there, soaking 
in the torrid suns, her hideous iron houses hideously 
ruined, her grassy streets given over to the true in¬ 
habitants and rulers of the island—goats. Nothing is 
196 


THURSDAY ISLAND 


197 


active in Thursday but the goats; no one is civilized but 
the savage blacks. The steamers call in, drop and 
take up pilots, drink a little water, and hurry on again. 
Thursday is, they seem to think, an excellent place to 
go away from. 

Nydia, during the last two days of her forced trip, 
had had time to make up her mind and lay her plan 
of campaign, and when the Kikenni cast anchor in quar¬ 
antine and began to blow trumpet-shells for a doctor, 
she knew just what she was, and was not, going to do. 
There was no use making a fuss about the fact that 
she was an unwilling passenger to T. I. The less said 
about that the better—with a view to the preservation 
of the highest possible market value of her spotless 
“character.” After all, in the island world, plenty of 
women—even young lovely women like herself—had to 
make passages alone in ships captained by queer char¬ 
acters. If she held her tongue nobody would see any¬ 
thing astonishing about the trip. She could trust 
Tombazis to hold his. 

By and by the doctor’s launch came out, and the 
doctor of the year—a fat, elderly person with an in¬ 
grained hatred of ships—reluctantly permitted them 
to come alongside the wharf. Nydia had made the 
best of herself, by dint of starch and irons com¬ 
mandeered aboard and a gay green sash of Tombazis’s, 
eagerly presented to her by that infatuated sailor. 
Thursday Island, she knew, was inhabited by something 
very like white savages, but she meant to look her best 
before them. Nydia would have wanted to look her 
best if one had been leading her out to instant execu¬ 
tion, or drowning her with her heels and thumbs tied, 
like a witch of old. 

Blazes, once alongside, lost a little of his conquering 


198 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


demeanour, but nevertheless he was determined to make 
the best of the situation, even as Nydia, from her 
point of view, was determined. 

“Well, my lovely lady,” he accosted her, as the 
Kikenni sidled nearer and nearer in to the wharf, “how 
soon can you be ready to come up to the parson’s with 
me ?” 

Nydia smiled her sweetest smile. She had no inten¬ 
tion of making any such visit, but she thought it was 
safest—on this tiny island—to temporize with the im¬ 
pulsive Blazes until such time as she should have been 
able to find out the fate of Charlie Holliday. She did 
not disguise from herself that his death, if unhappily 
it had occurred, would make a difference. 

And if events ever drove her to think of marrying 
Blazes, why, two shares in the treasure of Oro Island, 
if it existed—and shrewd Nydia thought it did—would 
certainly be better than one in return for her precious 
hundred pounds. Perhaps if she played her hand 
skilfully she might get Tombazis’s share out of him 
without the necessity of marrying him in return. 
“Ple’d do anything for me,” she thought complacently. 
“And after all, I’m not in his power now.” 

In which, as she was to find later, she had reckoned 
without her Tombazis. 

“I don’t know about parsons,” was her answer to his 
question. “I’ll have to think a little about that. And 
anyhow, I must get some clothes. Do you realize, you 
dreadful man, that I haven’t a rag to wear?” 

“There’s some quite decent shops here if you can 
wake them up enough to attend to you,” answered 
Blazes. “Never been here before, have you?” 

He cocked an eye at her, as if the answer were of 
some importance. 


THURSDAY ISLAND 


199 


“No, never,” she answered carelessly. “And, by the 
look of it, I don’t much care if I never see it again.” 

“Come on, and we’ll put the dredge through their 
dear, delightful shops,” offered Blazes, amiably. 
“Name anything in the town, and it’s yours. My 
treat.” 

“I can go to the bank, thanks,” replied Nydia, 
proudly. 

Tombazis threw her a queer look, and then glanced, 
slyly, at one of the crew, a cunning Hanuabada boy, 
who was trotting down the length of the wharf, ap¬ 
parently bent on some kind of business. Nydia, oc¬ 
cupied with the awkward, tilted gangway, did not 
notice. 

Once landed on the wharf, among the Thursday 
Island crowd of idlers—Japs, Chinese, Malays, black 
Queensland aboriginals, Europeans with queer pole- 
jawed faces and skins of fish-belly white—she drew 
herself up, patted her hair, and set off along the 
tram-line between squared piles of deliciously smelling 
sandalwood to the town. Blazes, without by your 
leave or with your leave, accompanied her. 

“You know,” said Nydia, coldly, pausing to look 
up at his lumbering height from under her parasol, 
“that I’ve only to appeal to the Resident or the police 
to be free of you at once.” 

“Yes, darling lady, but I know you won’t,” replied 
the big man, calmly, “because they would tell tales all 
over Thursday Island—and that means all over the 
coast of Australia—about the lovely young woman 
who was run away with by that villain, Tombazis. And 
I haven’t quite the best character in the islands, dear 
lady—though they aren’t particular in the islands. 
No, I don’t think you’ll tell.” 


200 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Nydia was furious with him for having so correctly 
read her thoughts. 

“Well, I can tell you,” she snapped, “that, Resident 
or none, I mean to take the first boat that goes south 
to Sydney from here.” 

“Yes?” said Blazes, smiling a little and busying 
himself with the lighting up of one of his big cigars. 
“Come in and buy some pretties first.” 

They entered a gloomy, unpromising looking den 
guarded by a sort of dirty human spider more or less 
white, who—reluctantly, it seemed—began, at Tom- 
bazis’s order, to unpack and unroll wonders in the way 
of silken and gauze blouses, kimonos, skirt lengths. 
Nydia was ravished; this sort of Oriental luxury was 
exactly what appealed to her. It was always with an 
unwilling hand that she spent money on the simple 
tailor-mades and linens that she knew to be good form 
in Sydney. 

She chose underthings, she chose silks, satins, gauzes, 
and gave orders to have the bundle sent to the ship. 

“They’ll be paid for on delivery,” she said. “Or, 
perhaps, you might send them to the hotel. I shall be 
going ashore.” 

Tombazis, who had been waiting, with an odd gleam 
of amusement in his eyes, remarked: “You’d like to 
take your room, perhaps?” 

“Yes, I should,” answered Nydia promptly. She left 
Tombazis, and made her way to a gorgeous, ginger- 
bread-y building, nearly all artificial front, where a 
supercilious, tired woman in a silken dress, patent 
shoes with holes in them, and bare legs, received her 
with a silent stare. 

“I want a room for the night,” began Nydia. 

“Gentleman, too?” 


THURSDAY ISLAND 


201 


“No. I’m by myself.” 

“Where’s your luggage?” 

“Unfortunately, it was left behind,” allowed Nydia, 
growing uncomfortable beneath the stare of the gor¬ 
geous slattern. 

“Pay in advance, then.” 

“Of course,” said Nydia, putting on her duchess air, 
which called forth an unashamed giggle from the bare¬ 
legged lady. “I’m just going down to the bank.” 
She walked out of the hotel, scarlet with annoyance. 
There was a branch of the New Victorian Banking 
Company in Thursday Island—her bankers. They 
would attend to her. 

Ten minutes later she was leaving the bank build¬ 
ing, amazement and terror in her heart. The bank did 
not know her, and refused to cash checks for an un¬ 
known young woman. 

“You can radio to Sydney,” Nydia said, loftily. 

“I can’t identify you by radio, madam,” replied the 
clerk. “Did you come in by the schooner this morn¬ 
ing? Captain Tombazis’s boat? Yes? Well, we 
would take his identification; no doubt he will give 
it.” 

“No doubt,” replied Nydia, with the overdone cer¬ 
tainty that in banks does not carry conviction. She 
went down the steps, raging. She saw now what the 
wily Greek-Irishman had seen long ago—that a strange 
young woman in a strange town must usually depend 
upon her friends for money. And where were her 
friends? 

She did not know that the clerk might have bestirred 
himself a little more in her interest—might even have 
wired to Sydney, where his firm had many dealings with 
the Leven family and their relations, the Levis and 


202 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Mosses—if he had not, an hour earlier, received a brief 
line from Tombazis reading— 

Lady passenger on my boat from Port Moresby claims 
to be Miss Nydia Leven of Sydney. Cannot identify. 

“Another of ’em,” was his brief comment, as he 
dropped off again into the long day-dream that en¬ 
velops Thursday Island and its strangely unoccupied 
inhabitants. There had not been any caller at the 
Bank of New Victoria for three days previous to 
Nydia’s call. The last caller had been a remittance 
man with red eyes who wanted to cash a check torn 
from some one else’s book for a sum that neither he 
nor the possessor of the check book had ever owned in 
their respective lives. 

Up the endless tumble-down street, that was full of 
grass and goats, Nydia Leven walked quickly, her 
hands tight-gripped on her parasol. What to do 
next? She could have telegraphed to her bankers in 
Sydney, or to her married sister with whom she lived 
when at home, asking for an immediate remittance by 
wire, had she had the necessary shillings. It would 
take four or five, she calculated; one has to use the 
radio at “T. I.,” to get the mainland and then send 
on by land line. It might as well have been four or 
five pounds—or four or five hundred. When one has 
no money one has neither pounds nor shillings. Nydia 
had never struck her golden head against this elemen¬ 
tary fact before; she found it bruising. 

Pawnshops? She had a ring or two, a bracelet. 

. . . There was no sign of any such place. One 

might ask. . . . She turned into a shop, a strange 

mixed sort of place displaying odd sets of china of the 


THURSDAY ISLAND 


203 


patterns that no one buys; ironmongery; dirty tables, 
where, it was conceivable, tea might, disgustingly, be 
served. There was no one in the place. She stamped 
and knocked. A small, malevolent eye surveyed her 
through a hole in a door curtain—and went away again. 
Nydia waited, absolutely without result. 

“What a damned place,” she said to herself, and 
went out to the goats and the grass and the sun again. 
A Chinaman, loafing along in torn blue jeans and straw 
slippers, paused at her imperious—“Here!” 

“Is there a—a shop where they buy things here?” 
she asked him, finding the words come hard. The 
Chinaman looked at her with glittering black-glass 
eyes; she was certain, somehow, that he understood her, 
but he replied in an unknown tongue, hunched his 
shoulders, and went on. Nydia said “Damn” to her¬ 
self again. 

“I wish I knew some worse words,” she said. “I 
know now why men swear; it would do one good if one 
knew how. Damn! Blast!” 

A dried-up, leather-coloured white woman, dressed 
in the fashions of 1898, emerged from an alleyway, 
looked at her hard, and scuttled away, glancing back 
over her lean shoulder. 

“This isn’t real; it’s a bad dream,” continued Nydia, 
to herself, slapping her parasol at a tall black goat 
with devil’s eyes that stood in the middle of the side¬ 
walk and declined to move. She had to walk round 
him. 

The goat, or the 1898 woman, she did not know 
which, drove her to desperation. She stopped the next 
person she met, a slack, half-asleep-looking blue- 
aproned butcher with a leg of mutton trailing from 
one hand and a piece of steak hugged under his arm. 


20 4 THE SANDS OF ORO 

He seemed, in some mysterious way, to have lost his 
shop. 

“Where’s there a pawnbroker’s?” she plumped out. 
“I want to sell something.” 

“Nowhere,” said the butcher, staring fishily. Nydia 
knew he was lying. She was certain, by this time, that 
everybody in “T. I.” lied by habit and preference. j 

“What do you want to sell?” he asked her cunningly. 
(“No one should be a butcher,” thought Nydia, madly, 
“who looks so much like a fish.”) 

“A bracelet,” she answered. 

“What about a kiss?” said the fish-faced butcher. 

“Oh, God!” said Nydia, and turned down an alley- 
way at the end of which, to put the cap on the climax, 
she ran, unexpectedly, into Tombazis. The captain, 
very big, very white and gold, was lounging on a 
broken little bridge that led to nowhere; his demeanour 
was so carefully absent-minded that Nydia felt sure 
he had been following her the whole morning. 

“My lady,” said Blazes, sweeping off his cap, “this 
is a pleasure I didn’t expect. Come with me, and 
I’ll show you a Chinese place where there is tea 
that is—ah!” he sighed. “And cakes. You never 
dreamed. . . .” 

Of course he knew that the eleven o’clock tea of the 
island world was due, and that Nydia wanted hers. 
She gave in, tired out, and followed Blazes to a queer, 
sandalwood-smelling little shop somewhere off the main 
street. 

It was behind a collection of laundries and cake-shops 
hideously intermingled. The place was cool, after the 
furious sun of the street; the Chinaman was swift and 
polite; the food carried out Tombazis’s promises. 


THURSDAY ISLAND 


205 


Nydia’s greediness was one of her weak spots; in 
this, as in other small vices, she and Tombazis were 
one. Stacy would not, for the sake of a dainty meal, 
have made friends with a man who had violently ab¬ 
ducted her, nor for the sake of a crust to keep her from 
starvation. Mark Plummer, who contentedly fed on 
“tin and biscuit” for months when nothing else was to 
be had, would have liked Nydia even less than he did 
if he could have seen her in the Chinaman’s green-shaded 
shop, daintily, quickly nibbling into cake after cake, 
crunching one new delicious sweetmeat after another, 
an expression of perfect happiness gradually over¬ 
spreading her face—for indeed. Ah Sing was a master 
of his craft. But Tombazis understood. 

“You will be fat, begosh you will, my lady, after 
forty,” he thought, handing her another dish of cream- 
cakes. “But I like them fat.” 

Unthinkingly, he said the last words aloud. 

“What do you like fat?” asked Nydia. 

“Cream-cakes,” answered Tombazis, with a languish¬ 
ing look that carried his meaning home. Nydia was 
not, in these lazy days, growing slimmer. 

She bethought her, breaking a cake skilfully, that 
Blazes was a very comfortable companion. If there 
had been no Mark Plummer in the world. 

Over the shoulder of Tombazis, above his thick red 
features, rose like a mirage the lean, bronze-pale. 
Crusader-face of Mark, and Nydia’s heart leaped with¬ 
in her, so that she let loose the short, sharp, sighing 
breath all lovers know. Her love for Mark Plummer 
was the strongest, the least selfish thing in her weak 
and selfish nature. It was to her credit that she saw 
his fineness of soul as well as the clean, strong beauty 
of feature that had first attracted her. There was no 


206 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


particular fineness in Tombazis’s soul; between her and 
him the attraction was surely that of like to like. For 
all her superficial advantages of birth and education, 
Tombazis was on her level, and Mark was above it. If 
she did not actually know these things, she felt them. 
The months she had passed in Papua—that strange 
land where, class for class, “the best is like the worst” 
—had taught her something. 

If they had all met together in Sydney, she would 
instinctively have set down the weak and vicious Holli¬ 
day as unquestionably superior to all; Stacy next— 
because Stacy, too, came of “good people”—herself, of 
course, not below Stacy, she couldn’t quite have said 
why; then Mark, who certainly had manners but didn’t 
display them in the only proper place, Society. Last 
Tombazis, because he was a small merchant captain, 
and so far as one knew, not rich. 

As it was, things—to her view—had got hopelessly 
and absurdly mixed. But she wasn’t going to marry 
Tombazis. Certainly not—if ever—while Holliday’s 
fate remained doubtful. For if he were dead, w T ould 
not Stacy marry Mark Plummer just as quickly as she 
could catch him? 

So Nydia told herself; and Tombazis, who followed 
her thoughts pretty accurately, watched her, pulled 
his huge moustache, and told himself that events were 
going quite as well as he could expect. 

He had had a brief word aside with the Chinaman 
as he entered. Ah Sing had shaken his head and 
bowed, hands extended. He was thinking of this 
when he suggested to Nydia, by and by, that she should 
ring up the hospital and find out if Holliday was there. 
It sounded magnanimous, and cost him nothing. 

“Of course I will,” said Nydia, rising, and shaking 


THURSDAY ISLAND 


207 


out her silks and laces. “I’m sure we’ll hear he was 
put in there all right. Where’s the number?” 

But the hospital had never heard of Holliday; had 
not had any such accident case brought in. 

The Resident, furthermore, when rung up, assured 
her that the Aulis had not called at Thursday Island; 
was not, so far as the official knew, even in that part 
of the world. 

Nydia turned a little pale. She had been relying, 
more than she knew, on meeting with Holliday. She 
could have borrowed money from him, got him to help 
her somehow. For she was beginning to realize that 
she needed help. She imagined—and correctly—that 
it was not the first time Blazes had run off with a girl; 
though she was reasonably sure that no girl, pre¬ 
viously, had been treated with so much consideration as 
she had by that understudy of Bully Hayes. 

But now- 

No money; no friends; no way of getting out of 
Blazes’s reach except by creating a scandal about her¬ 
self, from which she still shrank. How could any girl 
expect to make a good match—even a love match, 
which wasn’t generally a good one—if she “posted 
herself” all over the Pacific as the girl that Blazes had 
abducted in his boat? 

Of course, if she absolutely had to, she would throw 
herself on the mercy of some respectable resident; no 
doubt there were such to be found if one looked long 
enough and hard enough. She would not in any case 
go back with Blazes. But things were black enough as 
it was, any way one looked at it. 

Her face was clouded as she drew on her gloves and 
walked out, leaving Tombazis to pay. With her native 
shrewdness about money matters she realized, now, that 



208 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


he had concealed the truth when he represented him¬ 
self to Plummer as penniless and obtained a share 
in the expedition for the use of his boat. She guessed 
that he had resources of his own somewhere or 
other. It made her think more of him, but also fear 
him more. 

Tombazis let her get ahead, and then followed, at 
some distance. She knew he was there, and it irked 
her. She could not think what to do next, and she 
knew he knew it. Every time she stopped to look into 
a shop window—there was nothing in any of the win¬ 
dows to look at but pearl-shells and inferior groceries 
—she saw him, about the same distance behind, a dazzle 
of white and gold under the green of the trees that 
shaded the footpath—strolling, smoking, completely 
at his ease, silently, amusedly watching her. 

Nydia, at last, began to lose a little of her nerve. 
She felt she had underestimated Tombazis. What on 
earth was one to do? She found herself at the com¬ 
mencement of the jetty again. A boy from the silk 
shop was walking back to the town. 

“Have you been down to the Kikenni?” asked Nydia. 

The boy, a yellow-brown mixed breed creature with 
stupid eyes, nodded. 

“Did you bring my things?” 

He looked over his shoulder, shouted “Yes!” and 
ran away. 

Nydia cast a quick glance behind. Tombazis was 
nowhere to be seen. 

In a moment she had made her plans. She must 
secure her “things”—the thought of deserting that 
bundle of splendours was unendurable. But she would 
not stop a moment longer on the ship than was neces¬ 
sary. She would bundle up the goods, carry them 


THURSDAY ISLAND 


209 


away herself—what did it matter, here where no one 
knew who she was ?—and find some one on the island to 
take her in. If there was going to be a scandal, well, 
then there was going to be. Something had to be done; 
she was getting frightened. She hoped Blazes wouldn’t 
meet her, but if he did, he could not stop her in public. 
And for the moment he was certainly not to be seen. 

She scurried down the wharf, looking right and left. 
Nothing but the blue flame of the water, the white 
flame of the sky, the little pearling luggers with thin 
pencilled masts riding at anchor, a boat or two drift¬ 
ing lazily seaward. She was safe enough. A little 
laugh bubbled up to her lips at the thought of that 
bundle of Oriental splendours for which Tombazis must 
undoubtedly have paid, or they would not have been de¬ 
livered. It was a good joke against him. Well, serve 
him right; it was only one small item of repayment in 
the long account he owed her. 

The Kikenni lay against the wharf, white-decked, 
green-painted, neat and clean. Blazes was a good 
sailor; his ship never went short of anything necessary 
to her looks. 

“Missus, you wantem something?” asked a tallish 
trousered Kiwai whom she recognized as the uncivil 
engineer. 

“One boy he bring parcel belong me?” asked Nydia, 
looking about her. It was quiet and peaceful on the 
Kikenni; a boy or two lay sleeping upon the hatch; the 
shadows of naked varnished masts swung lazily back 
and forth across the deck, pencilling its sanded white 
with blue. Out in the anchorage, the pearling luggers, 
coloured jade and ivory, rolled to the powerful Thurs¬ 
day Island tides; they seemed deserted, unpeopled. 
The red-roofed ruinous town dozed at the end of the 


210 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


long jetty beneath a white-hot sun. There was a per¬ 
sistent scent of sandalwood, sun-warmed and very 
sweet; underneath, as it were, flowed another and less 
pleasant odour, that of rotting shell. 

“You look very pretty,” said Nydia to the town, 
“but I don’t think I’m going to enjoy myself very much 
staying here.” Wherein (as people sometimes do) she 
spoke truth as yet unknown to her. 

The Kiwai, who had been staring at her rather un¬ 
pleasantly, said something quick in native to another 
Papuan. 

“Oibe [it is so],” answered the other. 

“Altogether somethings belong you,” said the en¬ 
gineer, to Nydia, “stop along you cabin.” 

“Bring them up,” ordered Nydia. 

“You go get ’em,” was the Kiwai’s insolent answer. 
He turned swaggeringly away, and spat a quid of betel 
nut, blood red, into the green of the sea. 

“By-’n’-by,” promised Nydia, sharply, “I tellem 
you boss altogether knocken off head belong you, my 
boy.” 

“All right,” said the Kiwai, watching her out of the 
tail of his savage eye. He also watched the sea. 
Something he saw there caused him to speak again to 
the other Papuan. The two stood waiting, Nydia sup¬ 
posed, for her to go down and get her things. 

She swallowed her anger, knowing, as she did, that 
the Western Papuan is always inclined to be insolent 
to women and resentful of taking orders from them 
when no white man is about. Anyhow, she had no time 
to waste. It was just luck that Tombazis had not fol¬ 
lowed her to the jetty. She could not help wondering 
a little, but her own eyes informed her that no such tall, 
stout figure as the Captain’s was visible anywhere 


THURSDAY ISLAND 


211 


along the whole quarter mile of wharfing. Even if he 
were hidden among some of the piles of sandalwood at 
the far end—a thing not very likely—still she would 
have ample time to go down into the cabin, get her 
finery, and reach the wharf again long before Tombazis 
could cover half the distance. 

There was not a sound as she went down the com¬ 
panion but the regular, sharp slap of the incoming 
tide against the Kikenni’s counter and the dull snoring 
of the boy asleep on the main hatch. The confined 
smell of paint and carpeting, kerosene and stored ap¬ 
ples, struck her with a suggestion of discomfort, almost 
fear. It made her feel shut up. But there was no 
possibility of that again. 

Here were the silks, a large and heavy bundle, put 
away on one of the lockers. She did not mind carrying 
it, at least as far as the wharf. One could probably 
find an aboriginal to help one with it up town—whither? 
Well, that had still to be found out. But one thing was 
certain: she wasn’t going back, or anywhere, in the 
Kikenni. 

Musing thus, she twisted the string tightly round the 
big parcel, with the view of compressing it as much as 
possible; tried its weight, and tucked it under her arm. 
She was standing with her back to the hatchway, 
through which most of the light in the little cabin fell. 
She had not taken more than a minute over the parcel; 
there was no sound behind her—but suddenly the light 
in the cabin lessened. Nydia dropped the parcel and 
flung round. Quick as she was, she was too late. 
Some one had come up without sound and slid the doors 
shut. 

An unexplained instinct made her glance sharply up 
at the coop-shaped skylight. One leaf was open. 


212 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Through it there looked a wide red face decorated 
with a cigar and a grin. 

“You ought,” said the owner of the face, “to have 
come down alongside the wharf with me, in a boat. It 
was much cooler, my lady.” 

“Let me out,” said Nydia, breathing sharply. 

“Why, darling?” asked Tombazis, as if he really 
wanted to know. He took the cigar out of his mouth 
for a moment, and beamed down at her with a Father- 
Christmas sort of expression. 

“Because, if you don’t,” said Nydia, succinctly, “I’ll 
scream the place down.” 

“No, dear lady, don’t,” answered Blazes. “You’d 
give me the trouble of coming down and stopping you, 
and I don’t want to do that, because I’ve done most of 
my business—got the diving gear and a bit more 
stores—and I want to take her out with the tide in 
our favour. Don’t interrupt me, please, my beautiful 
lady.” 

“I’m not coming back with you!” 

“Why?” 

“I’m not. Open that door at once.” Nydia was in 
a fury; her face was geranium-coloured; her hands 
quivered with an evident desire to claw some one. To 
be trapped like this—again! It was unbearable. 

“Now just tell me why,” persisted Tombazis. “I’ve 
a reason for asking.” 

“Because I won’t travel alone with you—you’re noth¬ 
ing better than a pirate.” 

“I thought it was something of that kind,” declared 
Blazes, with an expression of innocent surprise. “Wait 
till you’ve seen the other passenger. He isn’t the sort 
who would travel with pirates.” 

“He? What do you mean?” 


THURSDAY ISLAND 


213 


The boys were getting up sail; the Kiwai had gone 
down to the engine-room; vague clankings were heard. 
It was the flight from Oro over again. Nydia became 
nearly frantic. Was she destined for ever to lead this 
nightmare, Flying-Dutchman sort of existence, scour¬ 
ing the seas in company with TombazisP 

“You wouldn’t come with me this morning when I 
wanted you to go to church—naughty!” declared 
Tombazis, indulgently, with fat uplifted forefinger. 
“So I had to bring the church to you.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Mr. Hemingways,” said Tombazis, “would you mind 
just coming here and looking down the skylight?” 

The scanty light in the cabin was diminished some¬ 
what further, and the space beside Tombazis filled up 
by another head. Nydia stared at it, amazed. It 
was the head of an elderly skinny man with a loose 
mouth and reddish eyes. The man was, vaguely, re¬ 
fined-looking and at the same time vaguely repulsive. 
He wore a worn black coat with a clerical collar. 

Understanding came to Nydia. She saw that Blazes 
had indeed got the best of her. He had bought—for 
money, or for drink—one of the derelict parsons that 
may be found here and there along Australia’s northern 
coasts, as it were, in the waste-bins of the continent— 
and had brought him along for the voyage. 

She saw the whole plan. Tombazis was at the end 
of his patience. That humorous, amiable manner of 
'his, if she knew men, was not more than skin deep, and 
it was about worn through. He meant to deal fairly 
with her, according to his lights, but he did not mean 
to let her go. During the voyage she would be per¬ 
suaded, teased, frightened—who knew what?—into 
marrying Tombazis. 


214 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


And Holliday was dead—she was certain of it. And 
Stacy would be free to marry Mark Plummer, Mark 
with the clear Crusader face and the noble manner; 
Mark who could find gold-fields but couldn’t keep 
them; who ought to have had a wife like her to manage 
him and make him rich. . . . Oh! it was unbear¬ 

able; the world was falling to pieces. 

She must scream—she would scream—even if Tom- 
bazis came down next minute and “stopped her” as he 
had, amiably, threatened to do. He couldn’t kill her, 
anyhow. Now! 

Nydia was something of a singer; she knew how to 
place her voice. The shout she uttered went through 
the skylight like a rocket and resounded clearly down 
the wharf. It happened to be dinner-time now; there 
was scarcely a human being left about the jetty end. 
One man, a white man, carrying a suit-case and seeming 
to be in a hurry, heard the cry, and paused, with a 
puzzled expression on his face. Then he swung his 
suit-case upon his shoulder and walked a little faster. 

Tombazis, looking down through the skylight, shook 
his finger again at Nydia, and said to her, amiably, 
“Don’t, dear lady; I assure you you’ve no cause to 
worry. Tell her she hasn’t, Hemingways.” 

The red-eyed parson looked over his shoulder, and 
repeated obediently, “You haven’t any cause to 
worry.” Then he added, on his own account, “I am 
a fully ordained clergyman of the Anglican Church, 
only temporarily—temporarily—out of a parish. 
Captain Tombazis, who is a very worthy man, has 
kindly offered to give me this interesting voyage; I 
suffer from weak health. It will be a blessing to me.” 

“Yes, but what about me?” asked Nydia, loudly and 
rudely. 


THE DERELICT 


215 


“You-” began the clergyman out of a parish, 

but he was cut short in whatever he might have been 
going to say. The skylight darkened still further. 
A man shoved himself alongside of Hemingways—a 
third man, who took no notice of him at all, but stared 
down into the cabin, and called out amazedly—“Hallo, 
Miss Leven, what on earth brings you here?” 

“Mr. Holliday!” cried Nydia. 



CHAPTER XV 


THE DERELICT 


VDIA LEVEN, if not especially gifted, or highly 



educated, in general, was clever—brilliant, even 


^ ^ —on one point. Any circumstance, or chain 
of circumstances, affecting herself, she could sum up 
with the quickness of a “Calculating Boy.” She saw, 
in the moment following Holliday’s exclamation, what 
her game was, and played it without hesitation. 

“Why, Mr. Holliday, I am delighted to see you!” she 
said, casting a fascinating glance up at the skylight. 
It was true; she was extremely glad for more reasons 
than one. “Those stupid boys,” she went on, “have 
shut me in, and Captain Tombazis was just coming 
down to let me out; I suppose you heard me call to 


him ?” 


“I did; you squealed like a good one,” was Holliday’s 


reply, which, for some occult reason, he appeared to 
think witty—at all events, he laughed. His high-nosed, 
staring-eyed face looked grinningly down the skylight. 
Nydia’s apparent plight amused him. It had clearly 
not occurred to him that there was anything behind 
appearances. 

Nydia felt her heart lift with relief. She had argued, 
in the one swift moment given her for thought, that 
Holliday was plainly coming back with them; that it 
would be all right with him on board; that no one. 


216 


THE DERELICT 


217 


therefore, need know anything if she didn’t tell. She 
noted that the derelict parson had already slipped away 
to his cabin. “He won’t yap,” she thought gladly, 
using a phrase of Mark Plummer’s for sheer delight 
in thinking or talking like him. Was he not a hundred 
times nearer to her now, with Holliday recovered, and 
going back to Stacy, on board? 

“Marry Tombazis!” thought Nydia scornfully. 
“Not likely—now.” 

Whatever Tombazis felt or thought, no one could 
say at this juncture that he did not behave like a 
good loser. Quick as Nydia herself, he saw that the 
game for the moment was up. With a courtly bow he 
stepped to the companion hatch, unbarred it, and 
handed Nydia out, remarking gravely that the boys 
got more and more careless every day, and that what 
they wanted, one and all, was a good hammering with 
the tail of a stingaree. 

Nydia, still clutching her precious bundle, emerged 
and made for the cabin she had quitted only a few hours 
before. 

Holliday was engaging the Captain in close talk 
and did not take any particular notice of her. She 
put down her treasures in the berth and set to smooth 
her splendid hair, to wash the red dust of Thursday 
Island from her face and hands, and by and by, to 
select a delightful negligee of gold-coloured silk em¬ 
broidered in sea-blue, and tie and twist herself into it. 
“One must look one’s best,” she said. Mark Plummer 
was hundreds of long sea miles away—but, after all, 
three men were three men. 

Outside, as the Kikenni edged away from her moor¬ 
ings, and began to breast the seas, Holliday was relat¬ 
ing to the Captain at great length his many adven- 


218 


THE SANDS OF OHO 


tures on board the Aulis and afterward. It did not 
appear that anything of special note had happened to 
him. The doctor had decided against operating; 
Holliday had recovered under careful treatment very 
quickly; he had been put ashore at Darwin, spent a 
couple of weeks in hospital there, and gone down to 
Thursday Island by the Tai-Yuen, which had arrived, 
and left only the day before. 

“All the same, mind you,” he was saying when Nydia 
came out again, “it was touch and go with me. Touch 
and go. If the Aulis hadn’t come along, I should have 
snuffed out. Like a candle. Whoof! That’s what 
the doctor said. He said to me—‘Holliday,’ said he, 
‘but for your marvellous constitution, you’d be lying 
at the bottom of the Arafura Sea.’ And he said that 
never in all his professional practice had he met with 
such wonderfully healing flesh. I’ve got very healing 
flesh. Always had. Like a little child.” He opened his 
eyes wide, and stared solemnly at Tombazis, who was 
jumping to get away to the helm. 

“Wonderful!” agreed Blazes, hanging on one foot. 

“And the officers-—I never met such a chatty, 
pleasant lot; they recognized me at once for one of 
themselves—they said—Good God! who’s that ?” 

“Reverend Mr. Hemingways,” barked Tombazis. 
“See you again; wonder you aren’t dead.” He looked, 
with his moustache drawn up over an ugly grin, as 
though some regret were added to the wonder. 

The jaws of the islands were opening out. Tom¬ 
bazis, first and last a sailor when on his ship, left, 
without any ceremony, his passengers to amuse them¬ 
selves, and took the wheel from the hands of the im¬ 
passive Yassi-Yassi boy who was holding it. 

They pay pilots high about Thursday Island for 


THE DERELICT 


219 


knowledge of the reefs, than which there are no crueller, 
no more treacherous, in the Seven Seas of the world. 
It was Tombazis’s boast that no pilot had ever set foot 
upon the planking of the Kikenni. “Or ever will,” he 
would add, “as long as Davy Jones’s locker and I are 
strangers.” 

It was nearly an hour before he thought fit to give 
over the wheel to a coloured quartermaster and see 
about his dinner. Nydia, tired out, and piqued at the 
small amount of notice shown to herself and her finery, 
had retreated to her cabin for the two-to-four sleep 
customary among passengers at sea. Holliday, who 
had shown something like dismay at first sight of the 
derelict parson, seemed to have thought better of it, 
and was “yarning” with him up in the eyes of the 
ship—the quietest place, as Blazes did not fail to re¬ 
member, for a private talk. He wondered what they 
could be so busy colloguing over up there. That 
dam’-fool, Holliday (why in Heaven’s name hadn’t he 
died, when every one wanted him to?), hadn’t moved 
since they cleared the harbour, he must have taken a 
mighty fancy to the parson—or maybe they were old 
friends. . . . 

It was nothing more than curiosity—of which he 
had his full share—that moved Tombazis, while the 
boy was laying his dinner, to stroll carelessly toward 
the bows of the Kikenni and lean over her side, as if 
estimating the depth of water underneath her sheering 
keel. He knew what the down-rush of wind from the 
bows could do sometimes in the way of carrying talk. 

Holliday did not know; which was why he did not 
lower his voice more than a trifle. One had to speak 
clearly to be heard above the noises of the ship. 
The Kikenni , well out at sea now, was “carrying a bone 


220 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


in her teeth” and growling over it. The engine had 
been shut off as soon as they were out of the Straits; 
above their heads the great foresail and mainsail sang 
in the tearing breeze; the reef points drummed exult- 
ingly; the booms creaked, as the schooner lay ever 
more and more to leeward. It was a glorious after¬ 
noon; a true sailor’s day. 

Something in the day, the wind, the pace of the 
little ship, may have pleased Tombazis. He came aft 
again, head thrown back, hands swinging, lips humming 
gaily, as he went down to dinner. 

Soon beyond yon harbour bar. 

Shall my bark be sailing far. 

O’er the world I wander lone. 

Sweet Belle Mahone! 

O’er thy grave I weep good-bye. 

Hear, O hear my bitter cry, 

O, without thee, what am I, 

Sweet Belle Mahone! 

He paused, beside the shut door of Nydia’s cabin, 
to repeat the last two lines with expression. There 
was no movement inside. Tombazis grinned very 
cheerfully considering the graveyard tone of his song, 
and went down the companion, expressing in music his 
desire that Belle, videlicet Nydia, should “wait for him 
at Heaven’s gate.” 

Nydia, who was beginning to know her Tombazis by 
now, sat up in her berth, listening. Her face took on a 
certain uneasiness. Blazes was altogether too cheer¬ 
ful, it seemed to her, for a defeated suitor. 

“I wish I was well out of this,” was her conclusion. 
She made up her mind that she would seek Holliday’s 


THE DERELICT 


221 


company as much as possible, during the trip to Oro. 
She judged, by the run of the wind, that it would take 
them a good four days. Tombazis wouldn’t hurry. 

But Tombazis did. The little engine, commonly 
kept for emergencies, was put into commission almost 
directly after leaving Thursday Island, and, at an 
appalling cost of benzine, beat out its steady six knots 
against a wind that was, if not a foul one, certainly 
not fair. With the engine and a favouring slant 
now and then they made way rapidly. On the second 
day out it became plain that the next evening would 
see them back at Oro. Whatever his reason, Blazes 
was in a hurry. 

Nydia found that he troubled her surprisingly little. 
He was busy with the running of the ship, having no 
white officers, and seemed to spend most of his time at 
the wheel. Now and again, when he stepped off the 
wheel-gratings to let a native take his place, he would 
pause beside her deck chair and stand smiling down at 
her. But he never had anything in particular to say. 
He seemed reserving something. • . . Nydia won¬ 

dered. 

“I don’t care, I don’t,” she thought. “Holliday’s 
alive, and he can’t change that!” 

As they ran, day after day, over the seas of dark 
gentian laced with foam, by islands and islands ex¬ 
ceeding fair, exceeding lonely, where the trade-wind- 
beaten sands were marked by the thin feet of gulls and 
bos-sum birds, the trailing flippers of the turtle, the 
shaky, winding tracks of hermit crabs, and by these 
alone—Nydia watched, with astonishment, strange 
things taking place on the ship. Holliday, whom she 
had marked down as her especial cavalier for the voy¬ 
age, appeared to prefer the company of the derelict 


222 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Hemingways to any other, and Blazes, still more 
oddly, seemed fond of his society, too. But neither of 
them wanted the other about when talking with the 
parson. Holliday would lure him away into his old 
place in the bows of the ship, and there converse quickly, 
eagerly, while Hemingways sat on an upended meat- 
case, and stared at him with inexpressive eyes. It 
seemed at times as if the one were trying to persuade 
the other, and failing. 

Blazes, on the other hand, made himself agreeable to 
the parson in a general, open way, but Nydia noticed 
that he did so only when Holliday happened to be out 
of hearing. He seemed to wish, on the whole, that she 
should see how friendly he was with Hemingways. He 
used to bring him along to her, and sit on the hatch 
beside the two, drawing them into mutual conversation. 

“You know he isn’t a bad chap,” he explained to 
Nydia, privately. “Only the one thing keeps him from 
being just like any one else.” 

“As if that wasn’t enough,” said Nydia, contemptu¬ 
ously. 

“You’re never very sorry for the under dog, are you, 
my beautiful lady?” asked Tombazis, twisting his big 
cigar into one corner of his mouth and looking at her 
with staring pug-eyes. 

“When people get down so low, it’s their own fault,” 
was Nydia’s verdict. 

“Nothing’s ever any one’s own fault altogether, dear 
lady,” commented Blazes. 

“What awful nonsense!” 

“Not quite,” maintained the fat man, calmly smok¬ 
ing. “Ever look at Hemingways’s complexion?” 

“Why should I?” 

“Do look at it next time you talk. And look at his 


THE DERELICT 223 

hands. Hemingways has been dying, in nasty ways, 
for nine years.” 

“What!” 

“True—Sinuabada. That’s what made him take to 
drink. And lost him his parish in England. It’s all 
facts that he tells you—all about the parsonage with 
the ivy and the roses, and the pony-carriage, and the 
dear Countess up at the Castle asking him to dinner. 
Something got him, and it had claws, and he had to try 
and forget the claws, and he tried a bit too hard. So 
he had to come out to this beautiful country where 
none of his delightful friends were. And he went 
down, and he’s going downer. Has a bit of remittance, 
not much, and works it out marrying people. When 
he marries us-” 

“He never will!” bit Nydia. 

“When he marries us, beautiful lady with the golden 
hair, it’ll be as legal as if the Archbishop of Canter¬ 
bury did it. Hemingways has just got that one bit of 
beautiful pride left in his delightful soul. His mar¬ 
riages hold tight. He’s properly licensed, and never 
marries in any diocese where it doesn’t carry.” 

The Kikenni , running under sail this afternoon, 
leaned hard to the stress of the singing wind. Along 
her keel the waters of the lonely, reef-pricked Coral 
Sea, hated by ship-masters, fled in furrows of snow. 
Nydia, wearied a little by the sight of the empty, 
streaming sea, tired out with Tombazis’s long pursuit, 
found herself wondering, uncomfortably, why he told 
her all this. Surely he could not think she was worry¬ 
ing about the legality of a marriage that she had again 
and again declared should not take place! She looked 
vindictively at him as he walked away with the curious 
theatrical swagger that seemed to be part of himself. 



224 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Blazes always piled up that swagger a little higher 
than usual when he was “feeling good.” What had he 
to feel good about now? 

Lying back in her deck chair, she tried to find, again, 
her mood of happy musing. But Tombazis had ef¬ 
fectively broken up the dream. She wished the voyage 
was over. She wished she had never come to Oro, 
never come to New Guinea. The schooner rolled abom¬ 
inably, the wind was sickly warm. What a country! 
What a country! What a fool she was! 

Up in the bows Holliday and the derelict parson sat 
perched together, dark against the thin blue tropic 
sky. They were talking again. 


CHAPTER XVI 


THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 

N OT on the evening of the third day, after all, 
did Tombazis sight the island. An engine 
break-down, followed by contrary winds, kept 
him back, so that it was the morning of the fourth day 
out, just after sunrise, that saw the Kikenni at last 
beating up to Oro. 

On this there followed the longest day of Stacy Hol¬ 
liday’s life—a day that she will not forget till that 
day when all things are forgotten, and 

The mossy marbles rest 
Above her restless heart. 

The schooner could not make the island. 

Island dwellers know these days; to some lives, they 
have added years. The sailing-ship, white in the off¬ 
ing, big with her freight of news long waited for, hopes 
long deferred, the cruel wind, that beats her back and 
back, so that she seems to flutter, wildly, in the same 
place, like a bird trapped on a window-pane—the anx¬ 
ious hearts in the iron-roofed beach houses, weary to 
see her, hour by hour, tack uselessly, again and again. 
. . . There is but one day that is a worse day for 

Island folk, and that is the day on which birds gather, 
crying strangely, underneath the trees, and leaves 
225 


226 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


blow upward and turn white, and there comes a shield 
of livid brass upon the face of the sky, and men say, 
looking, white-faced, into the falling weather-glass, 
that the hurricane is near. 

Stacy had gone into her house and dressed, had 
ordered breakfast, waited, vainly, and taken her meal 
alone with Mark; had seen the sun climb up the sky 
and start on the homeward slope, had prepared and 
left untouched another meal, had gone, fifty times, 
down to the beach to look and see if the boat were 
coming nearer. And still the Kikenni hovered, as if 
bewitched by some cruel enchantment, just outside the 
reefs; still the steady, unfriendly wind blew up, and 
the blue was ridged with foam—white horses, away out 
at sea, galloping and galloping, always away from 
Oro. 

And she did not know her fate. 

As that endless day wore on it seemed to her as if 
her heart were being torn out by the roots. To-day 
must settle all—whether she was to be free, and to 
marry the man she loved, or whether life, to the very 
end, would mean a stumbling on a stony road—a 
chain. Stacy was normal—if most women were not, 
marriage, as an institution, would fall. She, like the 
average decent woman, knew only one way out, and 
that was the way that had opened when the Malay had 
crept to Holliday’s bed and thrust the knife into his 
side. She was past pretending; the fierce trial of this 
waiting day had burned away pretence. She knew 
that she wanted Holliday to die. 

Mark, the man of iron, showed no feeling outwardly 
whatever may have been taking place beneath his stoic 
calm. He busied himself all morning finishing off the 
outside supper table that he and Stacy had begun some 


THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 


227 


days before. They had found it pleasant to take the 
last meal under the casuarina trees near the beach, with 
stars beginning to silver the dusky blue and the wind 
humming sweetly, mournfully, as it hums in the casu¬ 
arina and the casuarina only, over their heads. 

The table was made of split black palm; it was a 
good piece of work and wanted only a last touch or 
two to be complete. With hammer, saw, and plane, 
Mark kept at work, looked seldom at the beating, 
wearied sail, and spoke scarcely at all. 

Yet all the time, all the day, he was watching the 
woman he loved, and there was light of hope in his 
eyes. 

So sweet she looked, so fine! “Fine” was the word 
that came instinctively to one’s mind, seeing Stacy. 
There seemed to be some necessary link between the 
swiftness of her mind, the bright courage of her char¬ 
acter, and the clear drawing of ankle and of wrist, the 
spring of figure, the upward tilt of beautifully cut lips. 
One felt that just so must finest silky hair, indefinitely 
waving, part softly above the forehead of a woman 
who was true as well as fair; in just that manner must 
her hands be shaped, her head set, proudly, on a little 
neck. Stacy’s looks were Stacy. She was a prize. 
And she might be his . . . now. 

The face of the pioneer told no tales. But never¬ 
theless, beneath its mask, the soul of the man was full 
of joy. Mark trusted his luck. 

Stacy did not trust hers—perhaps because she felt 
to blame in counting on a fellow-creature’s death; per¬ 
haps because she (like you, and like myself) tried to 
^heat the Dark Gods by feebly pretending that she did 
not really want what she did want. In any case, fear, 
as that heart-wringing day went on, took closer hold 


228 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


of her. She could not, at the last, have told if she 
were glad or sorry when Mark, raising himself erect and 
sheltering his eyes with his hand from the glare of the 
lagoon, called out to her: 

' “Look! I think he’s got the engine going at last.” 

“So he has,” called Stacy in reply. She ran for the 
glass, and turned it on the visibly nearing ship. 
Pins—white pins walking on the tiny deck; black 
pins—those were natives. How many white pins 
were there? A thick one—that was Nydia. A big 
one—that was Tombazis. Who else? O gods of luck 
and fate! who else? 

The glass jumped, the ring of blue sky and white¬ 
decked ship within it jumped and reeled with her reel¬ 
ing heart. . . . Her heart slowed down—down. 

She sucked at her suddenly dried lips. . . . There 

were two more white pins. 

“Give me the glass a minute,” said Mark’s voice, 
with the deep masculine burr in it that she knew and 
liked. 

“There are four,” she heard her own voice saying 
quite calmly. Mark looked through the glass. It did 
not shake as he focussed it and held it on the ship. 

In a minute he handed it back to her. She saw that 
his face seemed, suddenly, to cry out its age—“Forty 
years—forty years”—but there was actually a smile 
on it, placed there Heaven knew how, when he looked 
at her as he gave her back the glass. 

“So it’s the long trail,” he said. 

It was almost too much for Stacy. They had been 
used to pass away some of the evenings singing, under 
the hurricane lamp, outside the palm-leaf house. Nei¬ 
ther had much voice, but they had taken pleasure, now 
and then, in joining Mark’s rather toneless bass and 


THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 


229 


Stacy’s patchy mezzo in various popular songs such 
as go well in outdoor life when folk are of simple tastes 
and easily pleased. “The Long, Long Trail” was one. 

There’s a long, long trail a-winding 
Into the land of my dreams. . . 

. . . There’s a long, long night of waiting, 

Until my dreams all come true. 

It was the long, long trail, indeed! 

Neither of the two doubted for a moment that one 
of the white figures, now growing clearer in the low 
afternoon sun, as the schooner came straight ahead, 
was that of Holliday. Who the other might be they 
knew not, nor cared. It was enough that the dead had 
arisen; that the man who should have been in his grave 
was out of it. Stacy was not free. 

Yet, if anything could have made Mark like her bet¬ 
ter than he did it would have been her hurried excla¬ 
mation as the boat left the schooner’s side and began 
to glide across the lagoon, Holliday visible in the stern 
with the rest: 

“Oh, don’t let’s grudge him life—it’s so good to be 
alive no matter what happens. Poor Charlie, I hope 
I never really wanted him to die!” 

“Maybe you didn’t,” answered Mark, a trifle more 
gruffly than usual. “But I did.” 

There was no time for more. 

Out of the boat, as she ran her nose up the shingly 
beach, sprang, like a jumping-jack, Tombazis first of 
all. 

“Well, and how are all yer beautiful selves?” he 
asked, with the trace of Irish accent that generally 
came uppermost when he wished to be ingratiating. 

“I’m going to have a talk with you pretty dashed 


230 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


soon,” was Mark’s far from hospitable reply. “You 
want the thrashing of your life.” 

“What for?” asked Blazes, innocently, gazing at 
him, spaniel-eyed. 

“Yes, what for?” echoed Nydia, leaning on Blazes’s 
outstretched hand as she jumped off the boat. She 
was not minded to have any one take up her battles in 
just that fashion. The trip to Thursday Island was 
labelled, now, as a pleasure trip only. 

But Mark was not very much concerned about 
Nydia, nor did he mean to be downed, with Holliday 
glooming in the background and looking at Stacy as 
if he could have struck her. 

“For going off and leaving Mrs. Holliday with no 
lady on the island. It’s been horribly dull for her, and 
she’s not too pleased with you,” he maintained. 

“You can punch my head any time you like—and 
can,” asserted Blazes, with the utmost cheerfulness. 
“But it won’t be for any reason that I know of. Can’t 
Miss Nydia go down to T. I. to buy a few pretties 
without asking your leave or Mrs. Holliday’s ?” 

“Of course I can,” declared Nydia. “Stacy didn’t 
mind—did you, Anastatia, de-ear?” She knew that 
Stacy hated nothing more than the full sound of her 
absurdly formal name. 

Stacy glanced hurriedly at her husband—the look 
of the slave, as Mark bitterly thought. 

“Oh, no, I—that is, it would have been more—less 
lonely if you’d been here,” she said, somewhat lamely. 
She wondered why Charlie had not yet spoken. He 
was climbing out of the boat, taking considerable care 
of a pair of new white shoes, and after that first un¬ 
pleasant glance he had scarcely looked at her. 

The other man came next, and was introduced by 


THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 


231 


Tombazis, with the Irish accent turned full on, as “Me 
friend the Reverend Mr. Hemingways, come with me 
for his health.” 

“I’d like to know,” demanded Mark, who seemed in 
no lamblike mood, “what business you have to bring 
any one on a trip of this kind without my permission? 
Does the place belong to you or to me?” 

The Reverend Mr. Hemingways, standing, an odd 
black figure, on the sun-whitened beach, seemed not at 
all annoyed by this uncivil address. He looked hard 
at Mark, as if he were summing him up, and found the 
count not unpleasing. 

“I don’t think you’ll find me in the way,” he offered, 
in a low refined voice somewhat thickened by habitual 
drinking. “There was, unless I mistake, a question of 
a wedding-” 

“You do mistake,” came from Nydia, determinedly. 

“Perhaps, perhaps,” he said, without looking at her. 
He seemed to abstract himself, and fall away into a 
kind of dream. Stacy wondered what Charlie was 
going to say to her, and when he would begin. She 
knew him too well to suppose for an instant that he 
would take calmly the idea of her staying alone with 
any man, under any circumstances whatever. Charlie 
was no cultivator of the “charity that thinketh no 
evil.” 

There was a moment’s silence among the reunited 
party. Above their heads the palm-trees rattled like 
a thousand silken dresses shaken in the wind. The 
westering sun, behind the hills of Oro, peered at them, 
red-eyed. “So you’ve come back; we didn’t want you, 
and we wish you’d go away,” the spirits of the island 
seemed, almost audibly, to say. 

It was Holliday who broke the silence. Looking 



232 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


sidewise at the parson, he took a step toward Stacy. 
The parson, from the midst of his dream, seemed to 
keep watch; to note what Holliday was doing, what he 
might say. 

“Well!” was Holliday’s weak remark. “Well!” 

“Well, Charlie,” was all that Stacy found to say. 
She would not voice the obvious—“I’m glad you’re bet¬ 
ter.” She knew she was not glad. 

Holliday looked at her in a cross-eyed sort of way, 
with his hands in his pockets. She wondered why he 
did not kiss her. She had made up her mind to that. 
Expecting it, she half shut her eyes. 

There was a movement; a sudden quiet. Stacy 
opened her eyes full stare. Charlie had gone. 

It was incredible, but he had. He was walking 
toward the house with his hands still in his pockets 
and his shoulders hunched up in the way that always 
told of sulkiness. Yet, through some curious intui¬ 
tion, Stacy understood that his sulks had not to do 
with her. Something—it must be a big thing indeed— 
was occupying his mind almost to the exclusion of 
herself and Plummer. If that was so, there was a 
chance of justice. Only when Holliday lost his head 
in one of his silly, quick rages, was he really unreason¬ 
able. 

She felt her heart lighten, without much reason— 
did not the “long, long trail,” even yet, stretch before 
her and Mark—the trail that was as long as life itself? 
Still she began to take an interest in what was hap¬ 
pening among the other people. 

“Don’t be a nasty crab, Plummer,” Tombazis was 
saying, while the rusty-black-clad parson sat on a palm 
log and looked at them all with incurious eyes. “Mr. 
Hemingways won’t get in the way of anybody’s delight- 


THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 


233 


ful business. He’s sick, and he’ll be all the better for 
a stay in a nice healthy island like yours if you choose 
to let him.” 

But Plummer’s hard obstinacy was awake. 

“This isn’t a hospital,” he declared, with narrowing 
eyes. “You can take your patient elsewhere.” 

“Where, my darling fellow?” demanded Tombazis, 
curving his hands and bending down to shelter the 
cigar he was lighting. It was certainly a windy eve¬ 
ning; the sun was going down fast and the breeze get¬ 
ting stiffer as day declined. 

“Thursday Island,” stated Mark, “is three days 
away. Daru is-” 

“Oh!” exclaimed Stacy. The Reverend Mr. Hem¬ 
ingway s had punctuated the discussion by falling back 
from his log on the ground, displaying the soles of two 
worn boots and a pair of thin bare ankles above 
wrinkled socks. 

Mark laughed shortly. “Dashed appropriate,” he 
said. 

Stacy turned on him like a little tigress. 

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she said. 
“He’s really sick.” She was down on her knees in an 
instant, lifting Hemingways’s head and placing his 
thin legs on the grass so that he lay easily. Mark, 
more concerned about her than about the parson, bent 
down to help. 

“The fellow is sick,” he allowed. Hemingways’s face 
had turned an ugly greenish yellow; his eyes were rolled 
upward. He seemed trying to say something; one 
hand feebly pointed to his pocket. 

Stacy felt in the pocket and pulled out a hypoder¬ 
mic syringe, ready filled. Hemingways tried to nod his 
head. 



234 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“Do you understand it?” asked Mark. Seeing by 
her face that she did not, he took the instrument, 
twisted back shirt and coat sleeves from Hemingways’s 
arm, and slipped the syringe underneath the skin, driv¬ 
ing the piston neatly home. Stacy watched with di¬ 
lated eyes. 

Almost immediately the greenish hue left the man’s 
face; his eyes became normal and he attempted to sit 
up. 

“Wait a bit,” temporized Stacy. 

The sun was nearly down now; it was beginning to 
grow dusk. Tombazis, smoking, regarded the whole 
scene with a sort of kindly toleration. Nydia looked 
frankly disgusted. “I hate sickness, I am so sensitive,” 
she volunteered. 

“Hush!” warned Stacy, “he’ll hear.” She was sit¬ 
ting on the grass, with the head of the semi-unconscious 
man pillowed in her lap, one arm, as she leant side¬ 
ways, supporting his shoulder. There was something 
strangely motherly in her look as she half nursed the 
derelict creature. Plummer, looking at her, felt his 
heart grow warm. He remembered, with fierce ex¬ 
ultation, that there was no child of hers and 
Hollidays’. 

“There’ll be others—some day,” he said to him¬ 
self. In that moment his belief in his luck came 
back. 

The man was reviving now. He looked up, and 
through the growing dusk caught a glimpse of a head 
bent over him; felt a soft arm about him, holding, pro¬ 
tecting. 

Nydia, aloof, her sparkling face expressive of cold 
disgust, stood looking on, and waiting till the unpleas¬ 
ant incident should end. 


THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 


235 


With sudden completeness Hemingways found him¬ 
self. He sat up. 

“You’re a good girl—a kind girl, my dear,” he said, 
blinking at Stacy with his drink-reddened eyes. “I 

had a girl once- Ah!” He rose, unsteadily, to his 

feet. 

“Gim-me your arm, my dear, to help me to that 
house,” he said. There was an odd tone of author¬ 
ity about him. “Thank you—thank you. I’m.- 

No, I’m not; mustn’t forget the cloth—but I’m 
blessed, as Tombazis says, if any one shall do you any 
harm.” 

“I certainly hope no one will,” was Mark’s quiet 
comment. He looked at the melancholy wreck of a 
man as though he were minded to ask questions. But 
Stacy would not have it. 

“Don’t bother the poor thing,” she said. “Let’s get 
him away to bed.” 

Mark walked with her, holding up Hemingways on 
the other side. As they went through the casuarinas 
toward the house they met with Holliday. He eyed 
them evilly in the falling gloom. 

“Good-night,” said Hemingways, suddenly, and very 
loudly. Holliday looked at him as if he would have 
liked to wish him something much less pleasant. But 
he answered after some hesitation, “Good-night,” and 
went off in the direction of the men’s house. 

Alone there, sulking, apparently, he ate his supper. 
Alone he stayed the night. Mark’s new house was oc¬ 
cupied by the other men. Stacy and Nydia, in the 
women’s house, exchanged such confidences as each saw 
fit to give. They turned to sleep, not without some 
lingering distrust, one of another. As each of them 
said, silently, to herself, “Who knew? . . .” 




236 THE SANDS OF ORO 

In the morning it seemed settled that Hemingways 
should stay. 


With the next day business began. 

The tale of the giant octopus had been told on the 
first evening, drawing screams of horror from Nydia, 
looks of concern and of jealous anger mingled from 
Holliday; and from Tombazis, a few sea oaths, less 
gentle than his usual Bowdlerizations. It was agreed 
on all hands that the octopus must die. A charge of 
gelignite was one of the requisites that the Kikenni 
had brought back from Thursday Island. 

The diving dress, too, was brought to the long 
beach, and the pump belonging to the outfit. Hem- 
ingways stayed in camp; the rest of the party joined 
forces and went off looking like a picnic. Nydia had, 
as usual, “made a toilet.” Stacy looked bright in her 
long smock of workmanlike blue linen; Tombazis was 
resplendent in new socks and tie. There was talking 
and laughing. A stranger, joining the party for the 
first time, would have thought it the most light-hearted 
band of holiday-makers he had met in a year. 

Yet, underneath the talk, the brightness, flowed 
fierce currents. Holliday had scarce spoken to his 
wife since he landed. Stacy was growing momently 
more and more uneasy as to what he could possibly 
mean by this determined silence, so unlike his usual 
character. Mark Plummer was sick at heart with 
jealous rage. Nydia was angry because Plummer did 
not notice her much; Tombazis was chafing because he 
noticed her at all. They trod the coral sands of Oro, 
they passed beside the fair, blue-crystal bays and 
under the low hills, green as parrots’ feathers; they 


THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 


237 


went from end to end of the little land that was free of 
all sorrow, all bitter care and cruel rivalry, and every¬ 
where they went they sowed these things, thick as in¬ 
visible weed-seeds, in the spiritual atmosphere that had, 
until their coming, remained pure. 

Will those who sail to Oro in future years feel, as 
these men and women felt on landing, the wonder of an 
unflawed, crystal peace? One cannot tell; one thinks 
it may not be so. 

When they had reached the reef—the tide was low 
to-day but not an octopus showed anywhere about the 
runnels and pools—it appeared that Tombazis and 
Holliday had both “gone down” in diver’s dress before, 
but that Mark Plummer had not. Tombazis now¬ 
adays could get into no ordinary sized dress. The 
honour, therefore, of making the first descent devolved 
on Holliday, or would as soon as the octopus was 
settled. 

Charlie, at this, began to boast. 

“I like going down,” he said. “Done it four times 
before. Did it at Broome, years ago, and once in T. I., 
and once at Samarai. I’ve got what you call a natural 
talent for it. Never bothered me from the first. They 
put me down—whoof!—and I knew the whole thing; 
managed my air like an old hand, didn’t tumble on my 
head. And I never was afraid. Lots of people are. 
They’re very brave while you’re getting them into the 
dress and putting on the helmet, but when you tell 
them to get over the side of the ship, and they see the 
water coming up their legs, why, most of the beggars 
chuck it, and beg to be taken back. Fact. I’ve seen 
it. But not I! I showed them from the first.” 

“That was very nice of you,” commented Tombazis, 
so gently that Nydia felt sure there was mischief com- 


238 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


ing. “You’re a wonderful man; now, I remember you 
were never sick on board the Kikenni. Were you sick 
anywhere else?” 

“Never,” lied Holliday, cheerfully. “Don’t know 
what it is.” 

“You do all your throwing off on land, don’t you, 
my darling chap?” asked Tombazis. Stacy, who knew 
the Australianism, and understood what a crass insult 
was conveyed by the accusation of “throwing off,” 
namely, bragging, felt uneasy for a moment. But 
Blazes had judged his man better. Holliday missed 
the implication, stock and barrel, and went on telling 
of his wonderful deeds. Plummer, who had avoided 
speaking to Holliday, now began to look at him in a 
way that made Stacy uneasy. 

“Oh, aren’t we going to get at the octopus?” she 
asked, hurriedly. The Papuan diving boys, who had 
been brought with the party, were standing about in 
the coral pools, staring at nothing; the sun was getting 
high. Outside the reef, where the giant octopus had 
its lair, there was not a sign to show that only two 
nights before those terrible steel arms had been cast 
far and wide into the harbour of the lagoon. It might 
not be the safest place in the world for hanging about 
in, but nobody remembered that, or would have trou¬ 
bled about it if any one had remembered. 

Plummer let no man do the handling of the gelig¬ 
nite but himself. 

“Too many one-armed men in Papua already,” he 
explained briefly. Stacy, who knew his utter reckless¬ 
ness where only he was concerned, smiled a little as she 
saw him trimming his fuse with meticulous care—nei¬ 
ther too long nor too short—cutting it in halves, and 
lighting the spare half to test its burning, before he put 


THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 


239 


the first into the package of gelignite. It was like 
Mark to consider others. . . . Charlie would have 

cut the fuse to a couple of inches, and used it untested, 
just to show his pluck. 

“All of you get out of the way,” ordered Mark, 
taking his stand on the edge of the reef. “No, 
farther than that—that’ll do. Keep there.” He lit a 
match. 

Stacy had a bad moment when she realized just why 
Mark had planted the rest of the party so well out of 
the way. She, of all people alive, had reason to know 
how long the terrible steel arms were; how far into the 
lagoon they might reach. Mark had put every one 
well out of danger—except himself. 

There was a tense moment of expectancy. No one 
moved. The sound of the tide, licking slowly out 
among the reef pools, was like the last breaths of a dy¬ 
ing man. At sea, a bird cried thinly. 

The package flashed up and fell. There was a huge, 
thumping explosion. Almost in the same moment 
Mark stepped actively off the reef edge, and half 
walked, half ran, back through the lagoon toward the 
rest of the party. 

A shriek from Nydia followed the explosion. Some¬ 
thing long—very long, dark, and whiplike—had flung 
itself out of the water within a yard of Mark, and 
swept past him, like a cable end sweeping the wharf 
when it breaks on the bollard and scatters death 
around. The thing shone wetly in the sun; it had 
white spots—one could not tell where. It began to 
whip about furiously. 

“Oh run, run,” said Stacy’s lips, silently. It was 
almost a prayer. 

Mark threw a look over his shoulder. 


240 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“Don’t worry, it’s done,” he called. In the moment 
of his speaking the thing sank down and began to 
wriggle, like a cut worm, among the coral pools. Then 
it slid—back, back. Like a snake going home, it 
slipped across the edge of the reef, yard by yard. 
Weight only was dragging it back; the life had gone. 

“Grappling irons!” ordered Mark, following the 
coils as they slipped. 

“Right,” said Tombazis, who was close on his heels. 
“Those lovely things, they don’t float once they’re 
dead. Give me the grappling iron, I’ve harpooned 
whales in my time.” 

He stood on the edge, an immense, bulky figure be¬ 
side the tall leanness of Mark, and cast the grappling 
iron with a practised hand. It was touch and go; the 
octopus, lead-heavy, was already well under water and 
sinking, but the iron caught the flesh of a long tentacle 
and held. Drooping downward, awash in the tide, the 
horror of the seas swung helpless, dead. 

Mark, leaning over, stared at it, fascinated. Not 
often, he knew, did man have a chance to see such a 
sight and live to tell it after. The dead thing had 
been badly shattered by the gelignite, which had at the 
same time blown a great lump out of the reef. Its 
body, big as one of the giant buoys that roll in harbour 
tides, was a mere mass of gray tatters; two or three 
arms were severed. The saucer-like sucker plates 
showed as the feelers swayed about. The thing was 
splashed and spotted with its own ink; an eye that 
had escaped floated loose on the surface of the water, 
black and white, big as a dinner-plate. 

“By gosh!” asserted Blazes, “she was a lovely one. 
You’ve bust her up all right. Must have been dead 
when the feeler came thrashing about.” 


THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 


241 


“Yes, muscular action, like the tail of a lizard when 
the lizard sheds it, and leaves it kicking about like a 
worm. They’re hard to kill. But this one is done. 
Boys, you can have him to eat.” 

Howls of joy accompanied the securing of the food; 
the natives, who had been keeping well away, rushed in 
and hacked the terrible arms to pieces with their knives, 
loading themselves with lumps of whitish-gray, semi¬ 
transparent meat. 

“Miss Nydia,” said Tombazis, as the women began, 
cautiously, to approach, “you shall have something 
good—you can’t think how good!—for supper to¬ 
night.” He reached down and hooked a lump of meat. 

“Shall I?” said Nydia, with interest. “I’ve heard 
of it.” 

“Do you want any?” asked Plummer of Stacy. 

She shuddered. 

“I can’t bear even to look at it,” she said. “I feel 
it all over me again, holding me—dragging- Ah!” 

“Well, I don’t much like eating crawly bugs of any 

kind myself, so here goes-” He drew the iron out. 

The rest of the huge shattered mass of body and ten¬ 
tacles sank heavily, waving as it went like coils of giant 
seaweed. Before it was out of sight black shark fins 
began to show near the reef. In a minute, looking 
down, the human watchers saw long, yellowish bodies, 
horribly flexible, darting at the dead monster and tear¬ 
ing into it as it sank. 

“That stops diving for to-day,” was Mark’s com¬ 
ment. 

“Surely no one means going down in such a place?” 
demanded Stacy. 

“I shouldn’t mind a bit,” loudly proclaimed her hus¬ 
band. “I’m not afraid of sharks. Once in T. I.-” 





242 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“To-morrow will be reasonably safe,” went on 
Mark, as if he had not spoken. “I’ll take the first 
trip-” 

“You—why, you haven’t-” 

“No, but every one has to begin some time. And I 
may as well say—since we’re all in it—that I’ve been 
pretty certain ever since those Malays were done for 
crossing the reef just here that the old Jap put his 
stuff somewhere in the neighbourhood. It was a queer, 
grotesque sort of idea, just what you’d expect from a 
Jap. You can all have a look at this.” He produced 
the shell, and passed it round. 

“Ah, I’ve seen that!” said Nydia, with superiority. 

Stacy wanted to add, “So have I,” but restrained 
herself. The men put their heads together, and han¬ 
dled the shell. 

“By jinks, but this is interesting,” commented Tom- 
bazis. “What do you suppose this line of dots means? 
Are they dots, or-” 

Mark gave him a quick look. 

“I think they might be ‘or,’ myself,” he said. “It 
does seem a big lot of fuss to make over a smallish 
thing, doesn’t it?” 

Holliday looked from one to the other. 

“What’s the idea?” he asked. 

“When you go down, my darling man,” said Blazes, 
pleasantly, “you’re liable to find out.” 

Stacy looked from one to another. She understood, 
too clearly for her pride, just how they classed the 
man who was her portion, out of a world of men. Men, 
among themselves, can be brutally plain. 

Charlie, of course, did not see. He never did see 
when people wanted to snub him. His vanity was ar¬ 
mour. 





THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 


243 


“I shall go down,” he said, “the first thing in the 
morning. I’ll-” 

Plummer and Tombazis were clearly not listening. 
The big man, spreading himself about in wide Greek 
gestures, and talking excitedly in an Irish accent, was 
telling Mark just where he thought search ought to be 
made. 

“Ye see, me dear man,” he was declaring, “the beau¬ 
tiful reef just here goes in in places, like the fingers 
of a blessed hand. See that sort of breakwater shock¬ 
ing out? If it hadn’t been there, the octopus could¬ 
n’t have stopped. I know them, the beautiful dar¬ 
lings, and they don’t like the open sea hitting them too 
hard. Well, there it was, the lovely thing, in its hole, 
hanging on to the reef wall, and sheltered by the bit 
that was a breakwater, and alongside of it—see!” 

The reef, as Blazes said, did, in this place, somewhat 
resemble a hand, fingers being represented by long 
tongues of coral, and spaces between by greenish-blue 
shallows filled with rocks of silver. 

“In there, me darling man—in there, where it’s shal- 
lowish, and where the big deep’s alongside-” 

“And where the octopus sat like a guardian devil— 
I see, I see! A dashed ingenious beggar, that old 
Jap!” Mark bent over the reef edge and stared. To 
left of him, depths unplumbed, black-blue went starkly 
down. To right, a little way, ran out the coral fin¬ 
gers, guarding shallower channels that were coloured 
turquoise green. 

The sharks, between the green and the blue, went nos¬ 
ing about, tearing the last of the great octopus’s sa¬ 
voury flesh. It was blood-chilling to see them so near, 
not stiff like other fish, but horribly flexible, hideously 
intelligent, looking up with cold green eyes—to watch. 




244 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


them moving at their hateful work yet hear no sound. 

“Well,” said Mark, straightening up, “for to¬ 
morrow. Boys, bring back the dress to the house, I’ll 
have the first try in the morning.” 

“Oh, no, you won’t,” laughed Holliday, maliciously. 

Mark paid no attention to him at all. He walked 
on across the shallows, leaving the rest to follow. 

“Plummer won’t go down to-morrow,” maintained 
Holliday, addressing Tombazis now. 

“Why won’t he?” asked the latter, shortly. 

“Because the dress is too small for any one but my¬ 
self.” 

“The Helen of Troy it is! Who says so? I 
ordered it full size from Harry Kiriko, and I saw it 
sent on board just before we cast off!” 

“Yes, so did I, and I saw it was small. You were 
too busy getting up the-” 

“Why, you beautiful, blessed—you—why didn’t you 
let me know ?” 

“Wasn’t my business,” said Holliday, mulishly. 

Tombazis looked at him, swelled and gasped once or 
twice, as if about to blow up from the pressure of vio¬ 
lent language contained within, and then, with a fran¬ 
tic gesture of his large hands, strode off behind Mark 
Plummer. Nydia and Stacy were already well away, 
but not quite out of earshot. 


Mark, fortunately, was not with the women of the 
party when Tombazis found him, and he had therefore 
no difficulty in expressing just what he felt when he 
found out that the only member of the party qualified 
to use the dress was Holliday. 

“I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him,” he 



THE KILLING OF THE DEVIL 245 

said, at the end of a brief but effective commination 
service. 

“Nor do I,” agreed Tombazis. There were no frills 
in his speech now; alone with men, he was a different 
Tombazis. “And what’s more, I believe he knows 
something you and I don’t.” 

“How could he?” 

“I don’t know, but he’s as cunning as a basket of 
weasels. There’s something up between him and the 
parSon that I don’t quite get aboard of, though I’ve 
guessed quite a lot of it.” 

“By the way, why did you bring that parson, hon¬ 
estly ?” 

“Honestly, Mark, old son, I brought him to marry 
that little etcetera of a Nydia and me.” 

“Marry her! Marry a wild cat!” 

“Cats have their points,” persisted Tombazis. “I 
like cats. Always have one or two about the Kikenni” 

“She won’t have you,” said Mark, twisting his mous¬ 
tache, thoughtfully. Though the least vain of men, 
he was not minded to deny an obvious conquest. 

“Make your mind easy,” replied Tombazis. “She 
will.” 

“Bet you five pounds.” 

“Done. It’ll buy me two new white suits in T. I.” 

“You seem jolly certain of winning.” 

“It’s so much a certainty,” said Blazes, “that I don’t 
like the idea of taking your money. I’d even venture 
another bet, but-” 

“What?” 

“You’re an impulsive sort of a cow at times; you 
might knock my head off.” 

Mark suddenly blushed scarlet. 

“I haven’t the least idea what you mean,” he de- 



246 THE SANDS OF ORO 

dared, hurriedly. “Don’t you think it must be time 
to turn in?” 

They were strolling under the casuarina trees, in the 
cool night wind that drew up from the lagoon. Stars, 
bright and many, hung among the dark-tressed 
branches like little magic fruits of gold. The stars 
made long pencillings of light in the sea-water. Some 
way off the henna glow of the hurricane lamps showed 
dimly inside the palm-leaf houses. 

Tombazis bent forward and laughed, soundlessly, 
till he shook. 

“You’d best not do that too often,” commented 
Plummer, disapprovingly. “You might burst.” 

“I feel like it, but I won’t—I won’t.” He stopped 
in front of Mark, and slapped him hard on the shoul¬ 
der. “I want to burst,” he said. “I want to blow up. 
You watch me when I do.” 

“If you’re not quite mad, finish your smoke and 
come on in. Don’t you ever sleep?” asked Mark. He 
did not seem particularly curious. 

Tombazis turned back almost toward the houses. 
As the two men walked together, they almost ran into 
a third—Hemingways. 

“Good-night, your Reverence,” bellowed Tombazis. 
“Hope you’re better.” 

“Much better, thanks; I think the place agrees with 
me—as much as any place can,” was the derelict’s an¬ 
swer. He passed them, and walked on alone. 

Mark Plummer, some time after, saw him coming 
back. He was with Holliday. The two separated just 
as they reached the square of light cast by the open 
door of the men’s house. It seemed as if they did not 
want to be seen together. 


CHAPTER XVII 


THE SECRET OF ORO 

N OW,” said Tombazis, “are you ready?” 

The Kikenni’s whaleboat was moored inside 
one long finger of the reef. The pump was on 
board; Tombazis had gone over it, tested it, and pro¬ 
nounced it fit to be trusted with the life of a man. The 
air-tube was in order, the valves of the dress working. 
Tombazis had, with his own hands, screwed tight the 
nuts that fastened Holliday into his little prison. The 
life-line was in place, the weights were on. It still re¬ 
mained to close the opening through which Holliday’s 
arched nose and prominent eyes looked forth by screw¬ 
ing up the front glass. After that, the man would be, 
for all practical purposes, deaf and dumb; in another 
minute he would die the little death that divers, all day 
long, are dying; he would be out of sight and hearing, 
out of reach save through the medium of the life-line, 
buried at the bottom of the sea. 

“Ready, aye, ready,” answered Holliday, boastfully. 
He could not even don a diving-dress without showing 
his essential cheapness of nature, yet he was no coward. 
It is a mixture more often met with in real life than in 
fiction, which persists in regarding the boastful man as 
essentially poor-spirited. 

“There’s no sharks about,” said Tombazis. “It’s a 
beautiful day in every way.” He spoke much as if 
247 


248 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


sharks were in the nature of flies or mosquitoes, annoy¬ 
ances that came or went with the weather. “Not a 
ripple—no ground swell even. Might have been made 
for you. Down you go.” He screwed in the glass, 
and flung his own weight on the opposite gunwale as 
Holliday crawled, like a treacled fly, over the edge of 
the whaleboat and down the rope-ladder. 

To Stacy, who had never seen a man go down before, 
the sight was nerve-shaking. It seemed so like deliber¬ 
ate suicide. She could not help admiring her husband 
for once; it was certainly a brave thing to do. 

Sitting in the dinghy, which had been brought out for 
her and Nydia, she looked fearfully over the side. 
There he was—there—a dark thing going down and 
down ... he had reached the end of the ladder; 
now, with a sudden drop and swirl, he disappeared, and 
there was no more Holliday, only a small stream of 
bubbles coming swiftly up and bursting in silver on the 
tourmaline green of the sea. 

For quite a while, now, as it seemed to her, they sat 
in the dinghy waiting—listening to the faint sucking of 
the water against the deep sea-wall, to the regular 
sighing of the air-pump, to the pat-pat-patting of the 
tide’s soft hands against the keels of whaleboat and 
dinghy. Stacy looked down at her hands and at her 
arms, in their short sleeves, burned to the colour of 
bark. She looked out across the islets and the reefs, 
noticing, as she did, how the outdoor life of Oro had 
lengthened her sight—she could see almost as one does 
through a telescope. She could hear like a bat or a 
bird—not a sound among the reef pools or in the air 
was missed by her—a faintly splashing fin, a fish-hawk, 
ever so far up, that called to its unseen mates, was loud 
as something spoken at her elbow. She felt the life 


THE SECRET OF ORO 


249 


of the open air and the sun, warm, powerful, equable, 
coursing through her veins; she knew, she could not 
have told how, that she had grown, on this far island, 
prettier than ever she had been in her life. She was 
glad—very glad of that. So ran her thoughts. 

And all the time the other half of her mind was down 
at the bottom of the sea with Charlie, wondering what 
he was looking for—what he would find. Like every 
one else in the party, she had caught the contagion of 
the idea that there was a mystery about the island; 
that the original idea of a simple cache of stolen pearl- 
shell was very far from covering the ground. The 
mystery seemed close to her now; the shut door stood 
almost visible before her eyes. 

She waited. 

Nydia, as soon as Holliday disappeared, had put 
him out of her mind. She was much more interested 
in Mark. Mark had been staring at her that day—he 
was staring at her now, she knew, though he managed 
to avert his eyes every time she looked up. She 
thought it seemed hopeful. 

If she had known, it was, and it was not. Mark was 
taking just that interest in her that all men take in a 
possible bride. He was turning over in his mind Tom- 
bazis’s words of the night before, and speculating as to 
what lay behind them. He knew men, and the world 
of men, well enough to understand that Blazes’s bet had 
been grounded on no empty boast. And yet- 

He turned his thoughts to his own affairs. They 
looked bad. The luck that he had blindly counted on 
—the gambler’s, gold-finder’s luck that had never 
failed him yet—seemed to have taken wings. He saw, 
in that moment of depression, no possible chance of 
calling Stacy, ever, his own. 



250 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


It was Nydia’s moment, had she but known it. 
There is always the moment when the woman is in earn¬ 
est. Many a love deserted, many a wife who has had 
to forgive, knows that—bitterly. 

Mark Plummer loved Stacy as he had never even 
dreamed of loving any woman in all his wandering 
career. But he was a man, and Nydia, as the probable 
captive of Tombazis, became interesting to him. And 
she loved him. And Stacy was not for him—ever. 

More things than one man’s life hung at the end of a 
string, were trembling in the balance just then. 

Nydia, always tuned keenly as a wireless receiver to 
catch flying thoughts about herself, looked up again. 
She met Mark’s glance, and this time he did not with¬ 
draw it. 

At the same moment, Stacy, leaning over the side of 
the dinghy in which they all were sitting, cried out: 

“He’s coming up!” 

In an instant every eye was fixed upon the water. 
A dusky shadow underneath the whaleboat was rising 
—rising. Tombazis’s attendant boy was hauling in 
as fast as he could go. 

A huge, shiny metal head popped out, looking, with 
its glaring front and side glasses, like some unbeliev¬ 
able sea-monster coming up to take the air. The boy 
helped Holliday over the side of the whaleboat. His 
front glass was unscrewed, and a red, puffing face be¬ 
came partially visible inside. 

“What luck?” demanded Tombazis. Mark did not 
speak at all. His hatred for Holliday and distrust of 
him had been at boiling point for the last twenty-four 
hours; he could not trust himself to ask a question. 
He was fully assured that the accident of the small 
size dress, if it had not been manoeuvred altogether by 


THE SECRET OF ORO 251 

Holliday, had been, at the least, deliberately concealed 
by him. 

“Give one time to breathe,” grumbled Holliday. 
And then, through the window: “There’s nothing. 
You may as well get me out of the dress.” 

Something told Stacy—who knew her Charlie—that 
he was not speaking the truth. If he had found noth¬ 
ing, he would have said “damned dress,” and cursed at 
Tombazis while he was being unfastened and un¬ 
screwed. He was altogether too amiable to her mind. 

Whatever the others felt, they said little. Mark was 
utterly silent, but when Stacy stole a glance at him, 
she saw that his black eyebrows had come down over his 
eyes like ruled lines, and that his mouth looked nasty. 
Tombazis let out a string of the absurd misfit oaths he 
affected. Nydia cried “What a pity!” and then a 
silence fell upon the party, and the boats rocked idly, 
with a slapping sound, upon the tourmaline sea. 

All for nothing! Was it possible? The long voy¬ 
age to Oro, the patient hunting through reefs and rocks 
and sands, the troubles that had arisen, threatening to 
tangle, in their common threads, the peace and happi¬ 
ness of at least four lives. All for nothing! Not even 
a pearl-shell! 

“Going down again?” asked Tombazis. 

“Not I,” was Holliday’s answer. “Get me out of 
the thing. What’s the use? I walked all over the 
place—stayed till I was near paralyzed; I’m all out of 
practice—and there wasn’t a thing but coral. And 
fish. And seaweed. Not a thing.” 

“Lord, man, you’ve got to try another beautiful 
place; we can’t give up like that,” declared Tombazis. 

“You may jolly well try yourself—if you can,” re¬ 
plied Holliday. It seemed he knew very well that the 


252 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


whip hand was his. He waited till Tombazis, under 
protest, and the native, had taken off the dress, and 
then allowed himself, with the rest of the disappointed 
party, to be rowed away home. 

Stacy, looking at Mark, wondered what would come 
next. Charlie had gone too far. He always did. 
His gigantic egotism invariably stood in the way of his 
obtaining a fair view of other men’s minds when his 
own interests were in any way involved. He did not 
realize that he was waking up a dangerous devil in 
Mark Plummer. Every one could see that there was 
something crooked about the affair; that Mark was 
being cozened somehow. . . . Mark was not the 

sort of person to cozen. 

What was Charlie up to ? She could only guess that 
he had found the shell—maybe more than any one 
guessed—and that he meant to keep the secret to him¬ 
self ; returning, no doubt, to Oro Island by and by 
alone when the patience of the other treasure-seekers 
should be worn out. 

If she was guessing, other people were busy in the 
same manner. It was not an hour after their return 
when Mark, seeing her seated under the casuarina trees 
by the shore, came up with what she called his “busi¬ 
ness face” on, and told her to come down to the an¬ 
chorage with him. She rather liked his abrupt little 
ways when he had some practical matter to deal with. 
He was always courteous in the things that mattered. 

Near the anchorage there were two or three shallow 
caves—early in the search dismissed as possible hid¬ 
ing places, and not used as shelters, since they faced 
away from the southeast trades, and were, conse¬ 
quently, rather warm. They were, however, well suited 
for a private talk. 


THE SECRET OF ORO 


253 


In one of the caves, seated on a low rock, she found 
Tombazis and Nydia, obviously waiting. There was 
an atmosphere of committee meeting about the whole 
party. Nydia, for once, did not seem to be thinking 
of her appearance, and was not even smoothing or pat¬ 
ting her wonderful hair. Tombazis had let his cigar 
go out, and was sitting with hands on knees, serious 
faced. (“He is like a pug,” thought Stacy.) 

Mark found a seat for her, and took one himself. 

“We don’t want to hurt your feelings,” he began, 
“but we have to tell you we all think your husband is 
not playing fair.” 

“I should think not,” said Nydia, unable to resist a 
pin-prick directed at the woman who owned a real hus¬ 
band and a real admirer, too—worse, owned the 
admirer she had marked for herself. “We think he is 
behaving very badly,” she went on. 

“Don’t you think you had better say all that to him¬ 
self?” was Stacy’s answer. The meekest of wives, the 
least happy, cannot easily endure to hear her prop¬ 
erty depreciated in public. 

“I’ll say it to himself fast enough, by and by,” re¬ 
plied Mark, “but for the moment, we have to hold our 
little council without him. We can’t hold it without 
you, you know.” Unconsciously, his voice took on the 
tone that a man’s voice holds when he speaks of love 
and the loved one. Nydia eyed him with green jeal¬ 
ousy. 

“Where is my husband?” asked Stacy. 

Nobody replied for a moment. Then Tombazis, to 
save the reply he saw rising to Nydia’s lips, put in 
somewhat hastily: 

“He—he’s tired and having a camp in the house. 
So is the parson.” 


254 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Stacy had seen, half an hour before, a boy carrying 
up from the schooner to the house a case marked with 
Holliday’s name. She flushed, and then turned pale. 
. . . “So is the parson. . . Every one 

seemed to be coupling these two together. “Holliday 
and the parson”—both with their feet, now, on the one 
black road. ... It wanted only that! 

Plummer saw, but saw, also, that there was nothing 
to be said. This loved woman must bear her own sor¬ 
rows, he not helping—he who would have 

Hid her needle in his heart 

To save her little finger from a scratch 

No deeper than the skin. 

“What a damned thing life is, anyhow,” he thought 
to himself. With his lips he said: 

“We don’t mean to give the matter up. Of course 
Blazes could go down to T. I. for a diver—if neces¬ 
sary.” 

Stacy was silent; she felt there was more behind. 

“The fact is-” said Mark, and stopped. 

“Oh, me beautiful man,” cut in Tombazis, “let me 
say it in my own way. The fact is, Mrs. Holliday, 
that we’re going to knock the lovely head off that beau¬ 
tiful husband of yours if he doesn’t tell what he knows, 
and so we give you warning.” 

Stacy opened her mouth, shut it again, opened it. 
She felt she must look like a frog. 

“Charlie,” she put in weakly, “has learned boxing. 

He used to win things. He-” She stopped, feeling 

the situation to be starkly impossible. It must be 
plain to these people that she was not, as she seemed 
to be, speaking in her husband’s favour. What was 
she trying to do ? 




THE SECRET OF ORO 


255 


Mark was looking at her, but he had shut off all ex¬ 
pression from his eyes; they were like bits of hard, 
blue-gray glass. 

“I’m going to put it to him to-morrow,” he said. 
“To-day would hardly be fair play. I’ll tell him——” 

“You will not, my darling fellow. I will.” 

“We won’t quarrel about it—especially before. 
• . . Some one will tell him that if he’s got hold of 

any information, he may give it up or fight for it. 
That seems to me a fair deal, if there can be any sort 
of fair dealing in such a matter.” Mark spoke with 
his committee manner; you remembered that he was in 
demand among the men of Papua, wherever clear and 
accurate presentment of any one case was wanted—in 
planters’ and miners’ associations; in deputations, 
meetings . . . Stacy could almost hear the un¬ 

spoken, “Have you anything to say?” which, out of 
courtesy to her, he omitted at the end. 

She answered it, unspoken as it was. 

“I can only say I’m ashamed of him if it’s true, and 
I’ll try my best to get him to give you his confidence.” 

“That’s what we wanted,” said Mark. “It’s always 
best to settle things peaceably when you can. Is that 
all?” 

Nydia and Tombazis mutely agreed that it was. 

“Then I should think we might be going back to the 
house.” 

They found no Holliday there when they arrived. 
The derelict, Hemingways, who had clearly had as 
much as he could carry, but who, equally clearly, 
seemed to carry it well, told them that Holliday was 
gone out to lie down in the shade somewhere. “I 
think,” said Mr. Hemingways, choosing his words care¬ 
fully, “that he was somewhat fatigued.” 



256 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


Stacy, scarlet with shame, understood him only too 
well. She could not stay with the others—Nydia, who 
would be spitefully sympathetic, Tombazis, who would 
laugh at it as a good joke, Mark, who would know ex¬ 
actly what she was feeling, and pity her. She left 
them all sitting about the camp, under a group of 
windy, wailing casuarinas, and went away by herself, 
down to the shore again. Mark had the tact not to 
follow her. 

Among the palms that fringed the back of the beach 
she walked restlessly, miserably, up and down. Had 
there not been misfortune enough before, that Charlie 
must take to drink? How was she going to bear it? 
How endure his company, when he made up his mind 
to forgive her that which he knew she had not done, and 
take her back again? 

Misery rose to flood tide. She walked madly up and 
down in the westering sunlight. She did not know how 
long she had been there; she did not know when she 
could face the others again. . . . The sun was 
in her eyes as she turned once again to walk through 
the seaward grove. It dazzled her so that she did not 
see, until she was quite close upon it, a dark silhouette 
advancing toward her—the unmistakable, thin, bent 
figure of the derelict Hemingways, for whom nobody 
was sorry. 

Stacy herself was not sorry in that moment. She 
choked back an impatient exclamation, and turned 
toward the unsheltered sand. 

Hemingways stood in her way for a moment as she 
passed, held out a shaking hand, and said—what did 
he say? Something silly, drunken, absurd—“Listen— 
you must listen—in the intress of m’rality.” What 
did he mean? She tried to pass him. He kept getting 


THE SECRET OF ORO 


257 


In the way; he was undeniably drunk. “In the intress 
of m-m’ralty, Mrs.Holliday. Always been a principle 
of mine. Marry them, I always say—intress of-” 

She dodged him, and fled. 

The evening was a positive nightmare. Holliday 
had turned up again, apparently not a scrap the worse 
for a whole afternoon spent in drunken stupor; indeed 
he seemed the better for it, for he was certainly more 
amiable. He did not resent his obvious banishment 
to Coventry at the hands of Tombazis and Plummer. 
He spoke to Hemingways now and then, and seemed 
almost inclined to boast of having been vilely drunk; at 
all events, he referred to it with a sort of bravado 
more than once. Hemingways, who had been fighting 
his own particular devil with fire, had nothing at all to 
say; he gazed dully about him, and sometimes fell 
asleep. 

Mark, on whose tact one might always depend, did 
his best to loosen the tension by bringing out cards. 
But Tombazis was not inclined for play, and Nydia’s 
offer could not be refused, and when they were estab¬ 
lished, at the black palm table. Blazes became jealous 
and talked to Nydia loudly and determinedly, spoiling 
the game. Stacy, wearying of the wretched scene of 
disagreement and distrust, left the party, and, lamp in 
hand, went down to the kitchen to attend to her usual 
duties as storekeeper. Nothing had been given out 
for breakfast yet, and it was nearly time for the boys 
to go to sleep. 

She found them, every one, sleeping, laid out on the 
grass about the cook-house, so utterly dead to the 
world that she had to bend down and shake the cooky- 
boy, in order to wake him. 

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Have 



258 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


you been getting at the betel nut again?” For Stacy 
was by this time familiar with the New Guinea house¬ 
wife’s curse. 

“No beesel nut,” said the cooky. “Me too much 
blanky tired Sinabada. Altogether boy he too much 
blanky tired.” 

Stacy looked at them; they seemed to be telling the 
truth. 

“What on earth has tired you?” she asked. But 
over the faces of the Papuans, one and all, dropped 
suddenly the sullen expression that the white man 
knows—“Too much work,” spat one boy briefly; and 
that was all they would say. 

Stacy gave out her stores, and came back, puzzled. 
Was she going mad, and suspecting mysteries every¬ 
where? Or were there really mysteries on the island? 

Next morning the tension seemed to have increased 
to breaking point. Stacy had had no chance of speak¬ 
ing to her husband, who had vanished after breakfast, 
but Tombazis and Plummer, nevertheless, were deter¬ 
mined to carry out their plan. Stacy, half hysterical 
by now, and not knowing whether she felt most like 
laughing or crying at the sight, saw them actually 
drawing lots with straws in a corner near the men’s 
house. Nydia was shamelessly peeping through a rent 
in the palm-leaf wall of the women’s house. Stacy 
thought her rather underbred until she realized that 
she was doing just the same thing herself—by the me¬ 
dium of two open, and opposite, doors. 

“Mark’s got the longest,” proclaimed Nydia. It 
seemed to be true. Tombazis flung his straw on the 
ground angrily and walked away. Mark looked after 
him for a moment, and then deliberately rolled up his 
sleeves and took in a hole in his belt. He looked about. 


THE SECRET OF ORO 


259 


Neither of the women were in sight. He asked a ques¬ 
tion of a native, and set off, with long determined 
strides, through the grass. 

“Are you coming?” asked Nydia, in an unnecessary 
whisper, putting on her hat. “I wouldn’t miss it for 
anything!” 

Stacy, opening her mouth to say, determinedly, that 
she would not even think of such a thing, found her¬ 
self, before she had had time to speak, running hard 
alongside of Nydia, in the grass that Mark had just 
passed through. 

“I must be there to stop it,” she thought. “I can’t 
allow such a thing. I never thought-” 

She was beginning to be badly frightened. These 
masculine passions—these hot loves, violent hatreds 
and jealousies—were dangerous things to let loose, 
here alone on Oro, away from all the world. Only too 
well she knew that a fight between her husband and 
Mark would have no real reference to its apparent 
cause. She herself would be the cause. She could 
not—she could not—why hadn’t Tombazis drawn the 
longer straw? That would have been another thing 
altogether. 

“Run faster!” she urged Nydia. “He’s right out 
of sight.” 

“He got a start,” gasped Nydia, who was not built 
for speed. But she kept on bravely. The grass 
ended; in a stretch of open pandanus ground they 
caught sight of two khaki figures. 

“Keep back now,” warned Nydia. “If they see us, 
they won’t fight.” 

“Do you—do you think I mean to let-” gasped 

Stacy, dropping into a quick walk. 

“You don’t mean to stop them?” cried Nydia. 




260 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“Why, there’ll be no end of fun.” She barely dissimu¬ 
lated her open conviction that Mark was, in any case, 
bound to win. It was almost as if she boasted. 

“I’m certainly not going to let them fight like two 
disgraceful prize-fighters,” declared Stacy, walking 
faster. “Come on. If you won’t, I will. Run down 
this slope; you’ll catch them quicker. . . . Char¬ 

lie ! Mr. Plummer! Ah!” 

She gave a cry, and started running harder than 
ever. 

The two men were in sight, close together, and as 
Nydia delightedly put it, “dodging to hit.” Mark had 
his back to the women; Holliday did not see them, or if 
he did, did not mind. He had enough to do guarding 
his own head from the lightning blows that Mark was 
delivering. Any man who understood the sport 
would have called it “very pretty.” Stacy wanted to 
stop them—to scream—she did not know what. . . . 

Nydia gave a cry of delight. 

“Mark’s got him—he’s punched him a good one. 
Oh! What are they stopping for?” 

“One of Charlie’s teeth has been knocked out,” said 

Stacy, very pale. “It’s hideous. I-” She began 

to move forward. Nydia caught her by the skirts. 

“Don’t spoil it,” she begged. “They’ll start again 
directly. I can’t see why they stopped anyhow. Men 
don’t worry over a thing like- Good heavens!” 

There was some reason for her cry. They had both 
seen Holliday, a moment before, spit out a small white 
thing on the ground. They now saw him drop half a 
dozen after it, spitting blood at the same time, for one 
of Mark’s blows had gone home on his upper lip and 
split it. 

“He can’t have hit out all those,” declared Nydia. 




THE SECRET OF ORO 


261 


“Does your husband wear false—Lord—Mark’s pick¬ 
ing them up. Is everybody mad?” 

Discarding all attempt at concealment, she ran down 
the slope followed by Stacy. The two men wheeled 
round as the women appeared. Holliday, one hand 
up at his mouth, seemed to be feeling his injuries, and 
at the same time feeling for something that was not 
there. Mark Plummer was holding, in the palm of 
one hand, seven or eight large, round pearls. A red- 
hot epithet had just hurtled through the air toward 
Holliday; the coming of the women stopped others that 
were apparently ready to take flight after it. 

“So that’s it, is it?” asked Mark, breathing hard. 
“So you didn’t know anything, and wouldn’t speak—no 
wonder!—with that in your mouth. You saw me com¬ 
ing, and hadn’t time to- Where are the rest of 

them ?” 

“Damned if I tell you anything,” was Holliday’s 
answer. He turned his head aside, and spat blood on 
the ground. “What do you want here?” he demanded, 
of Stacy. “Get back to your kitchen.” 

On the pandanus slope behind a gentle song, sung 
in a voice that was anything but gentle, began to sound, 
as Tombazis, with careful carelessness, strolled toward 
the excited group, trying to look as if he had come there 
entirely by accident. 

“From my fond lips the eager answers fall. 
Thinking I hear thee call!” 
sang the understudy of Bully Hayes. 

“So he’s told you?” was his comment. 

“He has not told me. He spit these out on the 
ground when I hit him.” Mark held up the handful of 
pearls. They were of different sizes, one or two very 
large, all perfectly round, and shining with the blue- 



262 


THE SANDS OF OHO 


white lustre that, in T. I., the home of the pearl in¬ 
dustry, marks a perfect “stone.” 

Tombazis blew a long, significant whistle. In the 
brief silence that followed the four white people looked 
at one another. Stacy’s eyes were fixed on the sulky, 
down-bent countenance of her husband. She was 
flaming all over with the shame that he, clearly, did not 
feel at all. Nydia and Tombazis, too, stared at Holli¬ 
day. Mark Plummer, calmly pulling down his sleeves, 
kept his eyes on Holliday’s wife. What would this 
last discovery mean to her? 

From a pandanus tree above them a leather-neck 
burst out suddenly in the weird bad language used by 
these strange birds: 

“Yer a regular cockolly-co! Yer a regular cockolly- 
co! Yer a reg . . 

The group under the tree did not hear it. They 
would scarce have heard a hurricane had one broken 
over their heads just then. It seemed as if no one 
knew who should speak first, or what should be said. 
Holliday solved the problem. 

“What’s all the dam fuss about?” he said, im¬ 
pudently. “Can’t I look for pearls where I like?” 

“Why, you-” Mark began, and broke off. He 

went on, with visible restraint: “Whose pearls are you 
stealing ?” 

“I like that!” declared Holliday. “Mine, as much as 
any one’s. The island may be yours, but I’m hanged 
if the Pacific Ocean is.” 

“Tombazis, is he right?” asked Mark, turning toward 
the sea captain, who had seen as many strange things 
upon the sea as he had on the land. 

“My darling chap,” replied Tombazis, “Fm in¬ 
clined to think he is.” 



THE SECRET OF ORO 


263 


“There now!” declared Holliday. “I told you I was 
within my rights.” 

“I don’t remember that you did. I only remember 
that you were sneaking off somewhere by yourself, and 
when I came on you, and spoke to you, you wouldn’t 
answer. You’d just been putting those things into 
your mouth out of your hand.” 

“Because I had holes in both my trouser pockets.” 

“It doesn’t matter a button where you had holes. 
You were morally stealing, and you knew it.” 

“Oh, morally! One’d think you’d been talking to 
old Hemingways. He’s always gassing about the ‘in¬ 
terests of morality.’ I suppose,” to Tombazis, “that’s 
why you brought him up to marry Miss Leven and 
you—in the interests-” 

“Do you want your face smashed in?” suddenly 
roared Blazes, turning in an instant from a peaceful 
ship captain ashore to a raging pirate. 

“Any time you like, but not before ladies,” was 
Holliday’s reply. 

“What’s there between the parson and you?” asked 
Mark, sharply as the cut of a whip. 

The blow got home, Holliday’s jaw went down, and 
he turned a little pale. He could not find an answer. 
Mark stared at him harder. Over Holliday’s blunt, 
high-nosed face there crept, by degrees, a flush of dark 
red. 

Meantime Nydia, who had held out her hand eagerly 
for the pearls, was turning them over and gloating on 
them. 

“Where he got these there must be lots more,” she 
said. “What do you think of them, Captain Tom¬ 
bazis ?” 

“I’ll run them over by and by,” replied BlazeSi 



264 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“Just now I’d like to knock some of the stuffing out of 
this beautiful,lovely chap, if only you ladies would find 
an errand somewhere else. Mark, old son, it’s my go 
—it is indeed. You’ve had your chance.” His face 
was as red as Holliday’s; he was breathing hard, like 
a man who runs. Clearly, it was with difficulty that he 
held himself back. 

Mark, gifted with more self-control, looked at him, 
and replied: 

“You know something more. You might as well tell 
us.” 

“Yes, let’s hear all the lies,” jeered Holliday, who 
seemed to be recovering from his momentary fear. 

“What,” roared Tombazis, “what did you mean by 
taking Plummer’s Yassi-Yassi boys on the sly yester¬ 
day, when every one, even the parson, thought you were 
laying off drunk ? Where did you take them to ?” 

“If you know,” said Holliday, “why do you ask?” 

“I do know, blank dash you, you blank dash. I 
know you took them to the reef—because you knew we 
wouldn’t make two visits in a day—and you had them 
doing skin diving all the afternoon. And what they 
brought up, you opened, and you got those out of 
them. And you meant to go on at the game on the 
sly, terrorizing the boys so that they wouldn’t-” 

“How did you find out?” asked Mark. 

“Just now—with a bit of lawyer cane.” 

“And you talk of terrorizing!” sneered Holliday. 

Tombazis went on, still bellowing like a bull. 

“Plummer took you up when you were broke, and 
brought you here, where you were no good to any one, 
just out of kindness, and gave you shares, and you go 

behind his back, and take his—you- I swear to 

God I’ll break every-” 




THE SECRET OF ORO 


265 


“Tombazis,” came Mark’s voice, very even and 
quiet, “I want to ask you something.” 

“What?” roared Blazes, turning on Plummer as if 
he had been the very culprit himself. 

“I want to know—as you’ve done plenty of pearling 
—why you think the old Jap left all that bed of rich 
shell alone when he seems to have known about it. It 
seems a bit risky.” 

“How do I know what a beautiful Jap thinks in his 
lovely mind, if he has any?” demanded Tombazis. But 
he seemed to be cooling down. 

“Well, it looks odd to me. I could understand it 
when it was only a question of a cache of shell, but now 
I don’t quite-” 

“You don’t want to understand any more than you 
see. The pearls are there, loads of them, and Holli¬ 
day’s found them.” 

“Yes, and I don’t mind telling you,” said Holliday, 
boastfully, “that you don’t come in. There was only 
a very little bed there, all together. I ripped one shell 
open under water, and found a big one, and after that 
I knew what to do. I got the whole lot up yesterday, 
opened them this morning, before any of you were 
about, and all of them you don’t see in Plummer’s 
hand—he’s stolen them, by the way—are put away 
where none of you will get them. What are you all 
howling about? Can’t a man use his brains when he’s 
lucky enough to have them? When I was in hospital 
at Darwin, there was a Jap in the next bed who used to 
talk to his friends when they came in; never knew I 
could understand—I was attached to the British Lega¬ 
tion in Tokio in nineteen-five; they didn’t treat me 
decently there, so-” 

“What did your beautiful Jap say?” 




266 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“Doesn’t matter what he said. But I guessed it 
wasn’t only shell that was up here. And I guessed 
right. Who wins the game now?” 

There was a silence; the men looked at each other. 
In the pandanus above their heads the leather-neck 
began again insanely: 

“Look at yer coat now! Look at yer coat now. Do 
it! You’re a regular cockolly-co! Get up!” 

A movement began. It seemed general at first, but 
by and by it became plain that every one was moving 
except one man—Holliday. Blazes’s hands, swinging 
outward at a sailorly angle, head well up, was seen 
detached from the group, and marching smartly away. 
Stacy, with an impulse she could not control, turned 
from the man whose name she bore, and made for the 
camp, with Nydia close at hand. Mark stayed just a 
minute; he was busy lighting his eternal pipe. He paid 
no attention at all to Holliday while doing it. Shortly, 
with the pipe hanging from the usual corner, he fol¬ 
lowed the women. Holliday was abandoned. 

“Damn them all,” he said, unemotionally. He had 
not much nervous voltage to come and go on at the 
best; the past scene had worn it out. Almost indiffer¬ 
ently he stooped and collected the pearls, which some 
one—perhaps Mark, perhaps Tombazis, certainly not 
Nydia—had thrown on the ground. He took a hand¬ 
kerchief out of his torn pocket, tied the gems carefully 
in it, and carrying them, turned off in a direction 
opposite to the camp. 

It had seemed to Stacy, the day before, that things 
could not possibly be worse than they were. She had 
had to find—as most people do find who throw down 
such a challenge to Fate—that things certainly could 
be worse by a good deal. The evening that followed 


THE SECRET OF ORO 


267 


on Holliday’s conviction was the worst of all. He was 
in an unpleasantly exalted mood; it was plain that if 
the drunkenness of the other day had been assumed, 
that of the existing moment was not. Hemingways, 
too, had been drinking, but for him Stacy could find 
excuse. She knew by now that the sudden fits from 
which he suffered were commonly followed by madden¬ 
ing pain, and the intervals between the fits and the bouts 
of agony grew month by month, slowly, certainly less. 

“When they meet and overlap, it will be the conclu¬ 
sion. I shall be finally terminated,” Hemingways had 
said to her, with his ineradicable love for the overpiled 
period of the sermon. “It may be a considerable space 
of time before that occurs—perhaps a year or two, 
perhaps somewhat more. In the interim, I do my 
best to make both ends meet—to keep body and soul 
from premature separation. Life, on any terms, is 
not without certain charms, strange though that may 
seem in the present instance.” 

“I’m quite sure you would like to live as long as 
possible; we all do,” had been Stacy’s trite but com¬ 
forting reply. “And I do think the island is doing you 
some good.” 

“Thank you—thank you—it’s kind of you to think 
about me at all,” was Hemingways’s reply. In his dull 
eyes there was the immense loneliness of the man 
doomed to wander through the earth’s dead ends, in¬ 
credibly far from all that had once meant home, hope¬ 
lessly out of touch with all the things among which he 
was forced, for ever, to live. “You don’t mind my 
drinking, do you?” he asked her plainly. “I never 
hide it. I can do a great many undesirable things, but 
lying is not one of them. I have had some apprehension 
that your energetic friend, Mr. Plummer, who, I under- 


268 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


stand, is in charge of the settlement, might object in 
some practical manner, by obliging me to go.” 

“I don’t know whether he would,” declared Stacy, 
“but I’m sure of one thing, that he sha’n’t.” She 
knew she could manage Mark so far. What did it 
matter if this most miserable creature sought the one 
miserable refuge open to him? I 

“I am glad that you can answer for him,” Heming- 
ways had said, with something like a sparkle of amuse¬ 
ment in his half-dead eyes. Stacy wondered a little 
why he was glad. It seemed scarcely right for him to 
be glad if he thought—and perhaps he did think—that 
she and Mark . 

To-night the wretch w T as sitting, dull and glassy¬ 
eyed, on one of the log seats, with his back against a 
tree, while Mark and Tombazis played cards, and 
Nydia hovered about, restless, and clearly disturbed in 
mind. Nydia did not know what to think of the failure 
of the expedition. Blazes and Mark were already 
speaking of return. Seasoned by many a disappoint¬ 
ment, they took things calmly—more calmly than she 
could pretend to do. Her money! Her precious 
money! Mark had said that she should have it 
back, and had brushed away her feeble, scarce half¬ 
hearted pretence of wanting to take her share of the 
risks and failures. But could they raise it among 
them, this company of broken men? She was by no 
means sure. She despised them—at least, she tried to 
despise them, having been brought up in a creed that 
attached almost American importance to the necessity 
of “making good.” Mark might be—was—the sort 
of man that almost any woman would want when she 
saw him, but she was not so sure that he was the sort 
of man a prudent woman would marry. When she got 


THE SECRET OF ORO 


260 


the chance—as of course she would. . . . They 

had said he owned the devil’s own luck. She saw no 
sign of it. 

As for Tombazis. She did not know what to think 
about Tombazis. Her thoughts fluttered about the 
reckless sailor as moths flutter about a lamp. She 
was still afraid of Tombazis. She knew he was not 
done with. 

By and by she saw that Holliday, in the lamplight, 
was leaning over the table, and ostentatiously handling 
something or other—it seemed to be one of the small 
enamel bowls they used in the kitchen. Nydia, eter¬ 
nally curious, managed to walk behind him. She clapped 
her hands across her mouth to keep back a scream. 
The bowl was full of pearls. 

Holliday had brought out the whole of his dis¬ 
honest gains, and was, with the worst possible taste, 
displaying them publicly, under pretence of sorting 
them. He picked out one from the rest, held it up, and 
looked at it. Then he dropped it among the others, 
selected a handful, and let them run through his fingers 
like rain. Then he matched two, and compared them. 
All the time his hands were shaking; his eyes shone 
drunkenly. It was clear he had had more than was 
good for his feeble nervous system—a very little made 
Charlie Holliday foolish; a little more, maudlin, and 
then violent. He was rapidly verging toward the latter 
stages, having drunk a good deal before joining the rest. 

“Look-er this,” he proclaimed in a loud tone of voice. 
“Look-er this lovely pearl. Two of ’em matches, by 
gosh. Earrings fit for prinshess. Can hang m’ wife 
all over with them like Hindoo id—Hindoo isol— 
and she won’t have anything to do with me.” He shook 
his head violently, and seemed to be near tears. 


270 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


The derelict, from his corner, looked on with more 
interest than one would have thought possible to any 
one in his condition. His pale eyes shone as they met 
the gems; his fingers made clutching motions. It 
seemed he thought he was handling pearls. 

Holliday went on with his foolishness; Blazes and 
Mark played cards. They finished their game. Mark 
produced a pencil and gravely noted down what he owed 
Tombazis. 

“That, and five pounds, by and by, to the back of 
it,” Tombazis remarked. Mark kicked him viciously. 

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid of shocking her; she’s 
not so beautiful easy to shock—that one,” said 
Blazes, who seemed rather Irish this night—a sure 
sign he was in good humour. 

“Well, you can talk about the bet another time.” 

“Who’s betting?” asked Holliday, loudly. “Shock¬ 
ing thing, betting and gambling. Very immoral. 
Never do it myself. Except sometimes. Now, who’ll 
bet me ten pounds I’ll get ten thousand in T. I. for 
this little lot?” 

One word had caught Hemingways’s ear. 

“In the intress of morality,” he began, monotonously, 
“in the intress of m’rality—I must have half.” 

“The devil you must!” shouted Holliday, suddenly 
quarrelsome. “I said one fourth, not a penny more. 
These are worth ten thousand—Ten? Twelve. 
Blazes, you know pearls. Come here. You han—you 
hannel these. Take’m up. Look at the size of ’m. 
Twelve thousand? Fifteen—twenty. Look, I tell 
you.” 

“I’m looking,” said Blazes, in rather a queer voice. 
He had come forward and taken a few of the largest 
pearls out of the bowl. His huge red face impended 


THE SECRET OF ORO 


271 


over Holliday like the night signal of a train. The 
lamps, set low on the table, threw lights of henna and 
shadows of Prussian blue on the heads of Holliday, 
Nydia, and Tombazis; on the little gleaming gems that 
lay like seeds of some magic fruit within the circle of 
the bowl. 

Mark, at the far end of the table, was methodically 
shuffling the cards and putting them together. A 
small wind suddenly blew up from the sea; it ruffled the 
loose cards and shook the lamp flames to and fro. 
Tombazis seemed to be—perhaps was—grinning. 
Something in his look arrested Mark’s attention. He 
put down the cards and walked to the end of the table, 
where Holliday was gloating over his bowl of pearls. 

“What is it, Blazes?” he asked. 

There could be no doubt now that Tombazis was 
grinning. He held a big pearl in his hand—a jewel 
fit for the crown of a reigning queen. He looked at it, 
lifted it, and laid it against his front teeth, drawing it 
lightly backward and forward so that one heard it 
scrape. Then he put it down on the table and took 
another—a third. Each one he scraped lightly on 
his teeth; each he laid down apart from the rest. The 
fourth pearl he took in his hand, looked at it, and tossed 
away carelessly to the shadows of the night. 

Holliday sprang up with a curse. Tombazis paid 
not the least attention to him. 

“These beautiful pearls,” he said, addressing Plum¬ 
mer, Stacy, and Nydia, and to some extent the derelict 
Hemingways, who seemed to have roused himself amaz¬ 
ingly—“these beautiful pearls are every one cultured. 
Manufactured, they call it in T. I. Cultured in Lon¬ 
don. But it’s the same anywhere. They’re made. 
The Jap made them—with the beautiful oyster to help. 


272 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


There’s a secret in it that only these Japs know— 
‘button’ pearls almost any one can manage, but not the 
round ones. They’re worth—if you market them 
honestly, which some don’t—a few shillings each. I 
reckon the Jap meant to fool people with them. 
They’re the best I’ve seen. Any one would buy them 
for real if he didn’t know enough to rub them against 
his teeth, as they do in T. I.” 

“Scott!” said Mark Plummer. 

“How do you know?” asked Nydia, sharply. 

“Lend me your pearl ring, beautiful lady, and I’ll 
tell you. Or don’t lend it. Do as I did with it. Now 
take one of Holliday’s delightful pearls, and do the 
same with that. Eh? Eh?” 

“It’s not the same,” allowed Nydia, amazed. 

“What’s the difference?” 

“My ring sticks—clings—just a little, and the other 
slips.” 

“Just so, my lady. Just so. That’s the best they 
use in T. I. There are people who have given good 
money to know it.” 

“Do you mean to say,” demanded Holliday, in a 
strangely tamed and lowered voice, “that these pearls 
of mine are manufactured?” 

“My dear, beautiful man,” said Tombazis, pleas¬ 
antly, “I’ve known it ever since you told us about your 
stealing them.” 

Holliday, in that sudden state of collapse, did not 
seem able to resent the term. 

“Why?” he asked, feebly, wiping his lips with a dirty 
handkerchief. 

“Mark put his finger on the weak spot. I didn't 
choose to allow it just then, but it came home to me 
next minute. My darling chap, why would any beauti- 


THE SECRET OF ORO 


273 


ful Jap find a bed of pearl-shell simply rotten with 
pearls, and go off to God knows where, making a memo¬ 
randum about it and doing nothing else? Can you see 
him? I can’t. But I tell you what I can see. I can 
see that beautiful Jap—who seems to have gone farther 
in the way of cultured pearls than almost any one else 
has done. I can see the chap taking up this island, 
which is on the whole pretty handy, and yet a mighty 
hard one for any one to get to who didn’t know the 
reefs. And putting down his little oyster bed there, 
safe that no one would find it. And choosing just that 
finger of the reef that was shut up safe by the grand- 
daddy of all the octopuses—think of the two Malays! 
And then the lovely chap went away to let them grow 
into beautiful necklaces, and he died, which was de¬ 
lightfully hard on him, if you ask me. And that’s the 
story, my beautiful stealer of other people’s pearls. 
And we’re all in the same basket, and delightfully sold, 
but you’re the soldest of all.” 

“Captain Tombazis!” demanded Nydia, who seemed 
almost more deeply moved than any one. “Will you 
really tell me that all those lovely pearls are worth 
almost nothing?” 

“I don’t say that, dear lady. If a man had his wits 
about him—and knew where to pass them off—but you 
can be jailed for it if it’s found out.” 

Nydia heaved a deep, long sigh, and fixed upon the 
pearls a look tender, regretful, infinitely pathetic. 

“It seems the most frightful pity I ever heard of in 
all my life,” she said. 

Holliday, stupefied with drink and sudden disaster, 
was sitting all in a heap, staring at the beautiful, use¬ 
less gems as one hypnotized. Stacy, half hating him, 
altogether despising him, yet felt the old tie between 


274 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


them stir in some degree. He had been hers—he was 
in misfortune, worse than the trouble that had over¬ 
thrown him at Siai station. She wished that there 
was anything she could say to lift him out of that dead 
misery. Men looked so wretched when things went 
really wrong. 

Then, in a minute, he laid all her kindly impersonal 
feeling dead with one stroke. 

“If I haven’t got any money, after all,” he said, 
thickly, looking up with red eyes at Stacy, “I’ve got 
my wife still, and it’s time she knew it. Stacy”—he 
said “Stashy,” she noted with a shudder of disgust— 
“you and I will get to Thursday Island as soon as 
Blazes will take us, and make a fresh start there. 

There’s been too mush;—too mush-” He did not say 

what there had been too much of, but he rose unsteadily 
to his feet and put a drunken arm across Stacy’s 
shoulders. 

Stacy let out a little cry as of a bird caught suddenly 
in a snare. Mark Plummer made one fierce, long step 
forward, and then stopped. He stood for a moment 
motionless, lips set in a hard line, eyebrows bent low 
over brilliant, clever eyes. Then he turned and seized 
the half-sleeping Hemingways by the arm. 

“Wake up!” he said. A jug of water stood on the 
table; Mark seized it and dashed the contents into 
Hemingways’s face. 

“What’s between you and that damned cur?” he 
barked, as the parson sprang to his feet, choking and 
struggling. 

Hemingways, fully aroused, stared at Holliday, who 
still held the girl in a half-drunken grasp. 

“I—he-” he began. 

“He promised you money. He’s got none! Tell it. 




THE SECRET OF ORO 


275 


or I’ll- No. Tell it, man, he hasn’t a penny. The 

pearls are bung. Blazes says so. Blazes knows 
something, too; he’ll make you talk, if I don’t.” 

“I have been listening,” began the parson. Then, 
pulling himself together with surprising effect, he called 
out to Holliday: “Sir ! In the interests of morality, I 
must ask you to treat that lady with respect.” 

“Oh, you’re awake, are you?” said Holliday, slacken¬ 
ing his hold. “Tell it, then. Tell it, and be-to you. 

You know I can’t buy you now, to put another year 
into your wretched carcass. No, you sha’n’t tell it. 

I’m - if you shall. I’ll tell it myself, to keep you 

from the pleasure. You married me and that Mata 
girl, in the interests of your cursed morality, didn’t 
you, in T. I., four years ago?” 

“I certainly did perform the ceremony of marriage 
between you and the native girl you had led astray by 
taking her from her village on a trip to Thursday 
Island in your company. I did so because the Gov¬ 
ernment of Papua visits that offence with a high fine— 
removing a native without permission—and because you 
had rendered yourself liable-” 

“Oh, curse it, you did it because you knew you could 
blackmail me for a marriage fee by threatening to 
tell.” 

“Not so. I saved you from the consequences of- 

“And you charged five pounds.” 

“I did it in the-” 

“Of course you did. In the interests of The Rev¬ 
erend Mr. Hemingways, as you always do. Well, you’ve 
done for me now, and not helped yourself very much by 
doing it.” 

“May I inform you,” said the little parson, turning 
formally to Stacy, “that your marriage with this man 









276 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


was not legal—undoubtedly not, from a legal point of 
view; indeed, it does not exist.” 

“We were never legally married?” asked Stacy, white 
as the foam on the reef below, her great eyes staring. 

“Certainly not.” 

“Then, all the time I thought I was his wife, I was 

his- Oh!” with the inevitable, world-old gesture of 

the woman wronged, she flung her hands before her 
burning face, and stood, a picture of shame. 

Nydia, that self-conscious and self-valuing maiden, 
looked at her with an expression that seemed to say— 
“Which of us is the better woman now, you proud 
matron?” Tombazis, seeing it, and not much liking it, 
bent over from his big height to whisper one sentence 
in her ear. Nydia jumped as if she had been shot. 
She had actually forgotten that aspect of the matter. 

They would—of course they would! And what was 
to become of her? 

Nobody was thinking very much of her in that mo¬ 
ment. Holliday had slipped away; one might, with¬ 
out exaggeration, have said that he slunk. Mark 
Plummer, watching him, turned to Tombazis, and lift¬ 
ing his pipe out of his mouth, said, casually: 

“You were talking about an end of lawyer-cane this 
afternoon. Where did you leave it?” 

“Cook-house,” said Tombazis, cheerfully. He rubbed 
his hands together as one well pleased. 

Mark, without another word, went off into the 
shadows, and Stacy saw him no more that night. 

Nor did she, or Tombazis, or Nydia, or the derelict 
parson, see Holliday. But next morning, when it be¬ 
came known that Holliday was in the separate hut 
originally built for men’s quarters, by himself, and that 
he was not well enough to get up for breakfast, every 



THE SECRET OF ORO 


277 


one, not excluding the native cooky-boys, knew that 
Mark Plummer—and the end of lawyer-vine—had seen 
Charles Holliday again. 

“I suppose,” said Nydia, greeting Tombazis at 
breakfast, “that things have about done happening by 
now. I think I’d like a little quiet for a change.” 

“I think they have done happening, my lady—all but 
one thing,” answered the Captain. “And you know 
what that is.” 

Nydia bridled. She thought she knew. 

But she did not; nor did Tombazis. The surprises 
of fate were not yet—quite—at an end. 


CHAPTER XVIII 


HEART OF GOED 

I N A windy red dawn promising near rain Stacy 
found her way down to the beach. She had lain 
waiting for the light through interminable hours. 
Talk with Nydia was what she could not face just 
then; she had come very late to bed, and meant to be 
up and away before the steady snoring at the opposite 
side of the hut died out in snorts, gasps, and the in¬ 
evitable—“Oh—is it time to get up?”—followed to¬ 
day, as it would be if she stayed, by something barbed 
and insinuatingly scornful. Nydia, she knew, could 
not forgive her for attracting Mark; and she had the 
means of revenge well within her grasp now if she 
chose to use it. Stacy was burningly sensitive about 
the position in which Holliday’s selfish and criminal 
folly had placed her. She felt that she wanted an 
hour or two of complete quiet, before the beginning 
of the day, to find herself a little, and grow accus¬ 
tomed, in some degree, to the changed horizon of her 
life. 

Not that she had failed to realize, from the first mo¬ 
ment, what this freedom must mean to her and Mark. 
But she was like a sailor escaped from a wreck who has 
been battered so long against drowning seas that he 
finds himself, once ashore, unable to do anything but 
278 


HEART OF GOLD 279 

He still and take his breath, scarce even thankful to 
find himself alive. 

The wind in her hair was comforting, cooling, after 
the hot night. She stood face to the east, watching the 
sky redden gloriously with the coming of the sun, and 
thinking, as well as she could think after the bewilder¬ 
ing crash of events in the last few hours, about that 
other morning—it seemed already long ago—when she 
and Mark had stood together in the dawn, watching the 
ship sail in to break their dream. The dream was a 
dream no longer. Some day—not yet—she would be 
able to realize that. 

The wind was rising; it blew her loosely coiled hair 
in long waves away from her face; it flung her white 
short dress out backward. She looked, in her long 
stockings and arched little shoes, like some new- 
fashioned figure-head for a new sort of ship; not classic 
—twentieth century in every line—yet as she stood, an 
inspiration for a sculptor. 

“You look as if you ought to be on the bow of 
something,” was Mark Plummer’s comment as he came 
up behind her, walking rustlingly through the sea-grasa 
that lined the beach. 

She had known he would come. She had had the 
space of quiet that she wanted; now she was steady, and 
could face the great hour of her life. 

“Well?” was all Mark Plummer found to say. But 
he made his eyes speak for him—those splendid, gray- 
blue eyes that so many women had desired; that had, 
through all the years, kept their best for her. . . . 

Mark had loved and gone away, more than once, more 
than ten times. But he had never looked at any woman 
as he looked at Stacy now. 

She could not have told, afterward, which of them 


280 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


it was who kissed the other first. The leather-necks 
might have told—they sat close by in the tops of the 
nearest palm trees, having the “morning hate” for 
which the leather-neck is chiefly distinguished, and 
seemed, in the intervals of mutual commination, to be 
watching the two humans with malicious interest. Yet 
there was nothing gratifying to a leather-neck in the 
sight of two people who stood with their arms about one 
another, minute after minute, saying silly things. 
They could so much better have stood a little apart, and 
exchanged recriminations—like the small people with 
the necks of leather and lungs of cast iron who sat 
aloft and cursed in the tops of the palms. 

“When are we going to be married?” was Mark’s 
first question. 

“I’ve got to be unmarried first,” answered Stacy, 
drawing apart from him. “Do let me alone, Mark, 
and let me think. You—you bewilder me.” 

“I’m very simple, all the same. I know exactly what 
I want,” stated Mark, loosening the long hold he had 
kept of this loved woman, and looking as if he purposed 
to resume it very soon. 

“I wonder,” said Stacy, suddenly turning white, “if 
we were right to believe all Charlie and that man said. 
There’s no proof but their word.” 

“Make your mind easy. Holliday was speaking 
truth. He was fairly candid—after.” 

“What did you-” began Stacy. But she saw the 

“shut-up” look she already began to know coming over 
Mark’s face. She changed her sentence. When Mark 
did not want to tell you anything. . . . 

“How can you check it?” was what she said. 

“Easy enough. Go down to T. I. and take a copy 
of the register. And by the way, you might as well 



HEART OF GOLD 


281 


know that he isn’t quite the stage villain he appears to 
be. Bad enough, but—he thought the first marriage 
wasn’t legal. Indeed, he didn’t mean it to be.” 

“How?” 

“Well, you know the Papuan laws—he was liable to 
get into a row for taking the girl out of the country, 
but not if he was married to her. So he thought he’d 
do what the thieves call the double cross. Heming- 
ways had got at him, and was more or less blackmailing 
him; and the Resident had heard of it, and threatened 
to report him to the Lieutenant-Governor of Papua; 
and the girl herself was trying to make a deal of it. 
He thought he saw his way out by giving a false name 
to every one—since he wasn’t known—and marry Mata 
as James Brown. It’s a very common delusion, by the 
way—that marrying under a false name makes the 
marriage illegal. Of course it doesn’t. I will say this 
much for the cow, he did not mean to commit bigamy. 
He meant to do all right by you. It was a big shock 
to him, I reckon, when Hemingways got at him and told 
him how things were.” 

“Would Hemingways have kept quiet if—Charlie—- 
had had the means to pay him?” 

“Who knows. Thank Heaven he didn’t.” 

“Thank Heaven,” echoed Stacy. “I can’t realize 
it all, Mark. I’ve dreamed it so often. I can’t think 
it’s true this time, really.” 

“I could help you to realize it,” suggested Mark, 
twisting his moustache, his arm stealing again toward 

her waist. “I find I can realize it quite well my- 

Damn!” 

The parson was standing beside them. Neither had 
heard him come, but he was there, black-clad, stooping, 
red-eyed, a blot upon the beauty of the scene. 



282 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“How long have you been here, might I ask?” de¬ 
manded Mark, sharply. 

“I have only just come,” replied Hemingways. “I 
spent a disturbed night. The old enemy—the old 
enemy.” 

“You mean whisky,” suggested Plummer. 

“Don’t be so hard on him,” whispered Stacy. “He 
can’t help it.” 

“I mean the physical disability from which I suffer 
—the ‘thorn in the flesh’—Ah! I hope you’ll have a 
pleasanter way of exit when your time comes, both of 
you.” 

“I must say you’re a cheerful sort of beggar.” 

“We have all got to die. And meantime we have got 
to live. Which brings me to the point.” 

“I thought we were heading toward that.” 

“You know, my dear Mr. Plummer and my good 
Mrs. Holliday—I give you the title as a matter of 
courtesy; it is not justly due, because my marriages 
are sound marriages, and they always hold. No one 

has ever- I think I wander a little. What I meant 

to say was, that I have always tried to act in the in¬ 
terests of-” 

“Yes, I know.” 

“So, to come briefly but effectively to the point, I 
am quite prepared to marry you at any time you may 
wish.” Plis dead eyes glowed; he looked like a fisher¬ 
man who, in the clear waters at his feet, has spied his 
fish and hopes for an immediate bite. 

Mark, tall, personable, looked down at him with a 
half smile, and kept on twisting his moustache. 

“It doesn’t sound such a bad-” he began. 

“I’d do it cheaply,” interrupted Hemingways, with 
sudden eagerness. “I’d do it for-” He paused 






HEART OF GOLD 


283 


briefly, eyeing the two with a horse-buying sort of 
look. “Four pounds,” he ended. 

Mark was opening his lips, but it was Stacy who 
interrupted now. 

“I never heard such nonsense,” she said, crisply. 
“As if I would be married in any such way. We should 
have to look things up and see that everything was all 
right. And—and get some clothes, perhaps. Any¬ 
way, it’s not to be thought of.” 

Hemingways fingered his chin, disappointed. 

“If it’s Holliday stands in the way,” he said, “I 
understand Mr. Plummer settled with him that he’s 
not to stop and run the risk of being charged with 
bigamy, on account of the scandal; he’s to go away to 
Africa or somewhere, and send an account of his death 
to the papers.” 

“Mark, is that true?” demanded Stacy. 

“Quite,” replied Mark, calmly. “I thought it the 
best way for every one concerned.” 

“Then that settles it, of course. You w T ill have to 
marry me as a widow. I only hope Nydia will keep 
from talking.” 

“I daresay Tombazis will manage that. Tombazis 
likes you quite a little,” observed Mark, pulling a long 
stem of grass between his hands. He was very matter 
of fact now; you never would have supposed that the 
leather-necks, only five minutes earlier, had seen and 
heard all that they’d seen and heard. 

“Is she going to marry him?” 

“Probably. I know Blazes.” 

“It might be as well to go and discuss the matter 
with one or other,” said Hemingways, thoughtfully. 
“By the way,” he added, over his shoulder, “if you 
should happen to be in Thursday Island, or the neigh- 


284 THE SANDS OF ORO 

bourhood, when the happy event occurs, may I ask that 
you will-” 

“You may,” answered Mark, pleasantly. “And I 
may answer that I’ll see you damned first.” 

“Mark!” remonstrated Stacy, as the derelict rustled 
away through the long grass—which, strangely enough, 
had given no such notice of his arrival as now it gave 
of his departure—“Mark!” 

“That’s my name . . . Mrs. Mark Plummer—• 

I think it doesn’t sound badly. Do you think I would 
give that rat the job? More likely Sydney Cathedral 
and a bishop, ‘assisted’ by some one or others. Unless, 
of course-” He did not finish. 

“Impossible,” said Stacy, with decision. “Mark— 
do you know we’re going to be very poor?” 

Plummer seemed to wince a little. 

“I do know it when I let myself think,” he answered.') 
“Then I realize that I ought to be kicked for letting 
you take up with me. I haven’t even a present for 
you.” 

“I’ve got one for you,” allowed Stacy, beginning to 
blush. 

“What, the little thingummy you always wear, and 
won’t let me see?” 

“It’s my luck—and yours. I can’t help being super¬ 
stitious about it. I couldn’t show it to you before, but 
I promised myself, if ever ... I promised you 
should have it then.” She was fumbling inside her 
blouse. A long gold chain came forth; from its end 
she detached a little shining heart, and laid it in Mark 
Plummer’s ready palm. 

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she breathed. 

Plummer stood absolutely motionless, staring at the 
heart. 



HEART OF GOLD 


285 


“My God!” he said. “Where did you get this?” 
He lifted it to his lips, and Stacy thought he was going 
to kiss it. Instead, he bit it hard. 

“Do you—do you know what it is?” he asked her, 
and Stacy, for the first time, saw her man of iron 
shaken. Mark’s hands were actually trembling. 

“It’s a heart.” 

“It’s a nugget—GOLD!” 

“Gold?” 

“Yes! Where did it come from?” 

“The creek.” Stacy was woman enough to feel a 
little disappointed at the reception her gift had met 
with. Not quite thus had she pictured the tender 
scene. 

“The creek? Will somebody kick me?—hard?” 

“Is there likely to be more gold there?” 

Without answering her question Mark put both 
arms round her, gave her a tender but almost hasty kiss, 
and started, walking five miles an hour, for the cook¬ 
house. 

“Tell them,” he called, over his shoulder, “to expect 
me when they see me.” 

Stacy reached the cook-house not long after him, 
but he was gone. 

“Taubada,” explained the cooky, “him takem one 
basin, him takem one fick [pick], him go long creek. 
What name I makem breakfass tooday? Hamanegg 
I make? Tausage I make?” 


It was ten o’clock—a long space of time for Stacy— 
before Mark came back to the camp. He came covered 
with mud, wet through, tired and hungry, but with the 
light of victory on his face—and another light as well, 


286 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


that she was to know, many times, in the years long 
after; that she did not yet know as the flush of that 
most formidable of fevers—gold fever. 

“I’ve got it,” he informed the assembled camp. 

“What have you got ?” asked Tombazis, leaning back 
lazily against a palm trunk, and smoking a long cigar. 

“I’ve got the most promising gold field I’ve seen 
since the Yodda broke out.” 

“What!” Tombazis, Hemingways, and Nydia all 
screamed out the word together; all jumped to their 
feet at once. No one doubted Mark; he was known all 
over Papua as the surest prospector in the Territory. 

“I’ve been the biggest idiot—the worst ass—comes 
of meddling with something else than your own business. 
If I’d just stuck to prospecting what I understood— 
well, we have it anyhow. And it wasn’t I who found it; 

it was-” he hesitated for the fraction of a second 

over the name; he did not fancy using the hateful mar¬ 
ried—unmarried “Holliday” or the maiden name that 
was more or less an insult. “It was Stacy found it,” 
he finished boldly. And in that word Nydia of the 
golden hair saw her hopes, for ever, go down. 

Characteristically, she reached for consolation to 
the next best thing. “How much share have IP” she 
demanded, on the spot. 

“One fourth,” answered Mark. 

“And Stacy has the same?” 

“Stacy and I have half. You have a fourth. Blazes 
has another. It’s going to be a real good thing. Of 
course, my owning the island doesn’t prevent any one 
coming here to take the gold-” 

“Oh—how unjust!” came from Nydia. 

“Not at all. That’s law. But we can pretty well 
clean it out before any one gets on to it. Stacy, girl, 




HEART OF GOLD 287 

you never spoke a truer word than when you said the 
little heart was our luck.” 

There was perhaps a touch of pain, in another and 
a warmer heart of gold, at Plummer’s words. Per¬ 
haps, in that minute, Stacy saw, far ahead, the years 
when gold and she were to struggle against each other 
for home, peace, stable position, all that woman loves 
besides itself. Perhaps she saw, in a prophetic flash, 
just what a woman must pay, in just how many pieces 
coined of her own heart’s blood, for the love of a 
pioneer. 

If so, she lifted the burden, as once she had lifted 
another; but this time, it was with pride. 

Hemingways, obsessed by his one idea, had been slyly 
watching Nydia and Tombazis. He had seen how the 
eyes of the big man turned toward her; how she, with 
the talk of gold and of shares, kept looking oftener and 
oftener at him. The iron, to his mind, was hot; he 
struck. 

“I hope,” he said, with a ghost of his old, lost society 
manner, “I may have the pleasure of shortly marrying 
you.” The words were distributed, judiciously, he 
felt, between the two. 

It was Tombazis who answered him. 

“Very soon,” he said. “In about half an hour. 
Give the lady time to do her hair.” 

Nydia let forth one of her little screams. 

“My hair doesn’t want doing, and I’m not going to 
be married,” she said. There was the least possible 
weakening in her tone. 

“A lady’s hair always wants doing,” asserted Tom¬ 
bazis, “but if you’ve any doubts-” He leaned for¬ 

ward. In a moment, Nydia’s dress, down to the knees, 
was hidden by a cataract of gold. 



288 


THE SANDS OF ORO 


“How dare you?” she asked, feebly. 

“I can do what I like with my own property,” said 
Blazes, coolly. Out of his eyes there looked, for a 
moment, the spirit that had changed his name, among 
men, to the fiery title he bore. Stacy, at such a look, 
would have risen and shaken off any chain by which he 
held her. Nydia, seeing it, cringed, and was almost 
pleased to cringe. 

“I’ll go and tidy my hair,” she said. 

“Put on your best dress at the same time,” counselled 
Tombazis. “Make yourself look very nice. It’s your 
wedding day, remember.” 

And Nydia, down at last, said only “Yes” and went. 

“It will be five pounds,” said Hemingways, quickly. 

“Ask Mr. Mark Plummer for the five,” answered 
Tombazis, in a lordly manner. “He owes it to me.” 


THE END 



/ 









































































